Backup & de-duplication

Exponential data growth, regulatory compliance, strict service-level agreements, and shrinking backup windows are forcing enterprise organizations to rethink their data protection methods. And with companies pursuing aggressive virtualization strategies and struggling to protect data residing at remote offices, IT managers face a new set of challenges.

One of the key drivers impacting backup performance is the amount of data that must be protected within the available backup window. Traditional solutions are inefficient because they back up everything—including duplicate data files and sub-file data segments that exist across thousands of servers, desktops, laptops, and offices worldwide. When combined with traditional daily incremental and weekly full backup schedules, the impact of duplicate data is staggering—companies often move more than 200 percent of their primary data every week. As a result, meeting short backup windows can be very difficult due to the sheer volume of data that must cross already congested networks, backup servers, and infrastructure.

The impact is especially severe for virtual environments, remote offices, and NAS filers. In virtual environments, each virtual machine represents an individual backup job, often with concurrent or overlapping backup windows, and includes redundant operating system, application, and file data. As a result, backups for virtual machines can often overrun backup windows and tax shared resources, leaving data unprotected and creating management issues for backup administrators. In remote offices, limited network bandwidth makes centralized, automated WAN-based backup nearly impossible. Instead, firms rely upon non-technical local staff, failure-prone tape-based hardware, and ad-hoc manual processes that often result in unreliable remote office data protection. Protecting NAS filers can be a significant challenge too, especially when full backups fail to complete within the allotted timeframe, which can hurt employee productivity and leave data unprotected.

By backing up duplicate data, traditional solutions also increase costs due to the extra storage capacity required. This is exacerbated by the need to retain data for many months or years in support of archive or regulatory compliance objectives. In addition, traditional backup often involves the shipment of physical tapes offsite, including unencrypted tapes, which can result in exposure of confidential information, theft, or data loss.

Next generation De-duplication solutions enable fast, efficient backup and recovery by reducing the size of backup data. As a result, de-dupe platforms enable efficient long-term retention of backup data on disk while dramatically lowering capital and operating expenses including floor space, power, and cooling..