Answering the question "Why would anyone want to dedupe as a post process" with a data-ingestion rate of a whopping 9.5 GB/s (Yes, that's GigaBYTES per second), Sepaton announced its newer, bigger faster virtual tape library, imaginatively named the S2100-ES2 VTL Series 1000 at the Symantec (formerly Veritas) Vision conference in Las Vegas this week.To handle that fire hose of data, the S2100-ES2 VTL Series 1000 can handle up to 1.6 PB of usable disk space after RAID-6 protection. Of course, getting that astounding performance requires an array of 16 dual Xeon processing nodes, but if you really have to backup 250 TB a night, half a rack of 1u servers to do it won't put that big a dent in your wallet.

Along with the new hardware, Sepaton's introduced a new version of its DeltaStor deduping software that has a spiffy new GUI that allows users to choose which of their backup data they want to dedupe and to follow the process and dedupe ratios.

DeltaStor is a content-aware application that identifies similar data objects in the backup stream using the metadata that's embedded in backup software's tape format and then generates byte-level delta information, storing older backups as change files while maintaining the latest backup intact. Using up to 4 processing nodes, DeltaStor can dedupe about 1,200 MB/s, or about an eighth the speed at which the VTL can ingest data.

The current version of DeltaStor supports Symantec's NetBackup. Users of TSM, NetWorker, and Simpana Backup (formerly known as Galaxy ) will have to wait a little while longer.