Home > Data Protection > PowerProtect DD Series Appliances > Dell PowerProtect Data Domain DD9410 and DD9910 > Storage
The new platform of PowerProtect Data Domain model has four types of persistent storage:
Operating system drives for boot, logging, and so on
Vault Optimized Storage Device (VOSS) for the SDPM (Software Defined Persistent Memory) for system recovery
SSDs for the performance cache tier
HDDs for user backup data in the Active and Cloud tier
There are 3 different storage tiers that are managed in new platforms (the boot drives are in RAID 6):
Enclosure | Function | Description |
Data Domain Controller | Boot / OS SSD | 1.92 TB, SAS-4 |
Cache Tier SSD | 3.84 TB, SAS-4 | |
SDPM SSD | 960 GB, NVMe | |
DS600 | Active / Cloud Tier HDD | 8TB, HDD |
FS240 | External Cache Tier (For HA Configuration) | 3.84 TB, SAS-4 |
The Boot / OS drives have DDOS and are used to log system information. The four drives are managed as a 2 + 2 RAID-6 array using DD RAID software.
It is a combination of hardware and software that together implement a software defined persistent memory subsystem. SDPM includes BIOS, memory, and CPU, which perform a high-speed memory dump from the CPUs DDR5 memory to M.2 SSDs in the VOSS when there is a critical event.
The SDPM helps to restore the data from M.2 SSD to memory when the server next boots. The size of the SDPM is 32GB.
In PowerProtect DD systems, for backup and restore operation, the DDR software fetches related metadata from the previous backup operation and stores it in the cache to accelerate high performance hash lookup on the active backup streams. The cache tier is stored on SSDs in a RAID 101 configuration.
For standalone models, all Cache Tier disks reside within the nodes, whereas for HA configured systems, Cache Tier disks will reside in an external FS240 enclosure. FS240 is a 2U, 24*2.5”, SAS-4 enclosure.
The number of Cache Tier SSDs varies based on the models. For 9410, five SSDs are required for Cache Tier, whereas DD9910 requires 10 SSDs.
All user data is stored in Active and Cloud Tier after it is deduplicated and compressed. All data is protected using DD RAID software, which implements RAID-6 data protection. The data protection software implements a fifteen-drive protection group which comprises 12 data disks, two parity drives, and one hot spare.
For new systems, the new Data Domain Platform supports only the DS600 disk array enclosure, which is 4U, 24 Gb/s, SAS-4 3.5” with 60 drives.
Users who upgrade from an older generation to a new generation can carry forward their existing DAEs from their old system with some restrictions. (For details, see the section Controller upgrade.)
9410 | 9910 |
8 TB DS600 DAEs | 8 TB DS600 DAEs |
FS240 (Cache Tier for HA only) | FS240 (Cache Tier for HA only) |
9410 | 9910 |
ES40 | ES40 |
DS60 | DS60 |
Shelf (Enclosure) | HDD Size (TB) | RAW Capacity (TB) | Useable Capacity (TB) |
ES40 | 4 | 60 | 48 |
DS60 | 4 | 240 | 192 |
DS60 | 8 | 480 | 384 |
DS600 | 8 | 480 | 384 |
The new Data Domain platform uses all 8 TB drives. This reduces the overall number of disks used in the system which decreased the number of spindles. To compensate for the reduction in the number of spindles, overprovision drives are added. In both the models, two disk groups are required as overprovision disks.