Most IT departments understand the value of data deduplication but we’ll recap them here:
Less Disk – Data de-duplication reduces disk utilization by 90 percent or more.
Less Cost – With less disk, logically you spend less on disk but the savings extends to reduced power, space, and cooling requirements… and backup administrators spend less time managing backups
Faster backup, faster recovery, less media failures – For backups and virtualized environments, deduplication reaps huge, obvious benefits as backups and VMDK files are typically copies of data already. Since writing and reading from disk is faster than tape, backup windows shrink and recovery is much faster.
Faster replication – deduplication reduces data locally so your replication will also be faster since you are sending less data.
These are the common benefits of deduplication no matter which vendor you choose. Now consider how you can extend the benefits of deduplication and further reduce cost and complexity:
AutoMAID: For most backup to disk environments, the backup window is no more than 8 – 12 hours. Does it make sense to spin that disk at full power for 24 hours a day? AutoMAID (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) energy saving technology (which is included at no extra cost with the Nexsan DeDupe SG) transparently places disk drives into an idle state to vastly reduce power and cooling costs. AutoMAID delivers the cost-effecdtive benefits of MAID 2.0 without the limitations of slow access times and special host software.
Global DeDuplication: Many IT environments have demanding backup schedules with narrow backup windows. The leading backup deduplication vendors address this by simply adding more deduplication appliances to handle the greater throughput. The problem with this approach is that these appliances are only aware of their own data and are not aware of the data in the other appliances. If you add more appliances, each one is an independent silo of deduped data and the consequence is a dramatically reduced deduplication ratio. For instance, if your effective deduplication ratio on a single appliance is 20:1 and you add a second appliance, your potential total dedupe ratio could be 10:1. Add a third appliance and your total deduplication ratio could be 6.6:1. Global DeDuplication is a feature included with the Nexsan DeDupe SG that addresses this challenge. Each node is aware of the data in the other which provides true global deduplication.
Have more questions about deduplication? Feel free to email me or call me at 440-498-2310.
-John Thome, Jr.
