Data Deduplication
Overview
With low cost and improved reliability of SATA disk technologies many organisations are moving to a disk2disk backup and recovery strategy to deliver improved backup and recovery speeds and ease of management.
Despite the low cost of disk, the size of the backup storage pool needs to be 5-10 times the size of the source data, depending on the retention policies and backup conventions used. A further consideration with a disk2disk strategy is disaster recovery planning and the creation of off-site copies.
Deduplication solutions can dramatically increase the amount of disk available for backup up data. Compression rates vary depending on the type of data but 10:1 is a reasonable average and rates of 100:1 are possible. Users will typically run a proof of concept before purchase to measure the actual rates they can achieve.
Deduplication makes it cost effective to retain many more backup sets on disk and hence improve recovery times.
Deduplication can be delivered in-line or post-processing. In-line processing means that the deduplication process occurs as the data is written to the deduplication device and before the data is backed up where as post-processing involves deduplication running after the backup is completed. Post-processing imposes an additional overhead on the backup server and hence in-line is considered most suitable for the data centre.
Disaster recovery planning in a disk2disk backup environment requires, at a minimum, that a second copy of the data is stored off-site. This can be achieved in the traditional way by a second backup to tape or by replicating the backup disk.
Different vendors achieve replication in different ways but having a deduplication device in a remote location represents a very powerful
remote vaulting solution. Once a full copy has been taken, only the changed and deduplicated data is copied. Consequently bandwidth and the time to replicate can be reduced dramatically. Replication functionality also delivers an effective solution for
remote office backup.
Key Deliverables
For Windows® Environments:
Cost effective disk2disk backup and recovery
Eliminate the need for tape for DR planning
Improved RTO/RPO
Vendor Alliance
