Data Protection
Data protection can be a very costly endeavor for an organization to engage in, depending on what the organization is trying to protect against and to which level they will protect the data. Until recently many data protection solutions were too costly for an organization to justify or they had to determine which data warranted higher levels of protection. The most effective way to protect data is to move it to a secure off-site location, which drives an entirely new set of requirements and challenges.
Adaptive took a look at the various data de-duplication technologies and found that inline data de-duplication addresses many challenges surrounding data protection and data growth. The reason for this is because the data is available for restore and replication faster than other software based or post process data de-duplication solutions. The two major benefits of data de-duplications are Data Compression and Data Replication.
Data Compression
Is the most obvious benefit that data de-duplication brings to the table and it's ability to squeeze out the redundancies in data sets which allows organizations to store more data on a smaller form factor for longer periods of time. Many organizations see an average:
- 20X Global compression
- 50X compression on full backups of large databases
- <70X compression for vm.dk files.
These compression ratios allow customers to reduce the budget needed for back up infrastructure and often times can decrease backup windows and restore times.
Data Replication
Is the most dramatic benefit that data de-duplication has on an organization is when a need to move data to an offsite location arises. Until data de-duplication became a main stream technology organizations had two choices to move their data offsite; architect a solution that has the infrastructure replicate the data over the WAN to another location or manually move the backup tapes to a secure location. These choices can often times be very expensive to implement and maintain as well as leave the data that you are protecting in a vulnerable state. When data has been de-duplicated is replicated a very small amount of bandwidth is needed because just the net new data is sent over the wire, many organizations have seen a 95% reduction in bandwidth when implementing data de-duplication solution compared to traditional infrastructure based replication technologies. The data is now secure as it travels over the wire and lands at an offsite location without having to use expensive encryption and key management technologies.