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Article Number: 000146075


DR4000 Overview

Summary: Gain insight and information on Dell EMC Storage products from engineers, peers and experts in the industry.

Article Content


Symptoms

The DR4000 is a high-performance, disk-based backup and recovery target appliance that is simple to deploy and manage. The appliance is available in 2.7TB, 5.4TB, and 9TB post-RAID storage capacities (with future support for an 18TB post-RAID model) and is ideal for deployment in small enterprise and remote office environments.

The DR4000 boasts an impressive feature set, which includes:

  • Inline deduplication and compression
  • Deduplicated replication
  • Advanced data protection
  • Replication licenses included
  • Non-disruptive deployment
  • NFS,CIFS, and future OST (licenses included) protocol support
  • Simplified management
  • All-inclusive licensing

DR4000 Building Blocks
The DR4000 firmware implements an inline, content-aware deduplication and compression engine. The software architecture consists of the following building blocks:

  • Front end protocol layer: This layer implements protocol support for incoming I/O. The supported protocols are NFS and CIFS. (OST and NDMP will be supported in future releases.)

  • Dedupe/compression engine: This is the key component of the architecture. The dedupe engine implements advanced chunking and deduplication algorithms to achieve space savings.

  • Ingest buffers: The DR4000 implements inline deduplication and compression. Ingest buffers, which reside in high-speed NVRAM, receive incoming data flows, and the dedupe engine works on the data in the ingest buffers.

  • Disk storage structures: Several key data structures are stored on disk, which enable efficient dedupe and compression operations. These data structures include:

  • Dictionary: The firmware maintains a list of references to all unique data chunks that have been encountered while processing the incoming user data. The dictionary is a dynamic list of the all unique patterns and forms the basis for deduplication.
  • Data Suitcase: This is the list of actual unique data chunks. The dictionary contains references to the unique data chunks in the data suitcase.
  • Blockmap/Objectmap Suitcase: This is a mapping file that maintains the mapping of user data to chunks in the suitcase. During the processing of user data, if a chunk matches a reference in the suitcase, reference counts to those chunks in the data suitcase are incremented, rather than storing a duplicate copy of the data.

Article Properties


Last Published Date

21 Feb 2021

Version

3

Article Type

Solution