Advocates Push Deduplication to Minimize System Downtime

Leveraging deduplication when backing up system edata can lower storage costs, reduce downtime and protect a company against expensive edata loss, experts said at an Oct. 18 webinar sponsored by Data Domain.

The technology is receiving renewed interest in part because more companies are recognizing the financial hit they take when their systems are down and/or edata is lost. Regulators and senior company officials are also pushing to reduce the backup window and recovery time associated with downtime.

This technology can be used to retain data on disks at essentially the same cost as on tapes, said Fred Moore, founder of consulting firm Horison Information Strategies.

Deduplication is the next generation backup and recovery system; it reduces the size of the computer system’s backup recovery load by eliminating redundant data, Moore said. It also reduces disk storage and bandwidth requirements. “That’s a big one” because the pricing on bandwidth has not fallen in the way other technology and software pricing often does after their roll-outs, Moore added.

After a few years of testing and discussion, deduplication is poised to “appear in a big way this year,” Moore suggested.

He also briefly reviewed some other backup procedures used by many companies today, and their relative strengths and weaknesses:

Mirrors: They protect the system from disk failure, but don’t protect against intrusion or corruption, and they double disk cost.

Snapshot: This is essentially a “series of still images of data,” Moore said. It is very fast, but also gets very complicated as more images are taken. It also does not protect against disk failures. However, it does protect against intrusion or corruption. Another negative: it can take time to find the recovery point.

Continuous Data Protection: A drawback is that it can be application specific and also takes time to determine the recovery point. However, it offers fast recovery and protects against intrusion or corruption.

Virtual Tape Library: It can usually fit in with the existing user’s environment. It has been around since 1997 in the mainframe market and has attracted a lot of vendors and other service providers. Unfortunately, it does not eliminate redundant edata issues, Moore said. — Michael Causey