Don't Overlook The Value Of Data Dedupe

By Gennifer Biggs, Business Solutions magazine.

One of the tangents to the growing popularity and flexibility of cloud solutions is the opportunities tied to adjacent technology solutions, such as virtualization. One often overlooked opportunity revolves around data deduplication. Helping drive along the business appeal of data deduplication is incredible data growth, which continues in the double-digit range year after year. "Growing capacity needs mean increased storage costs, not what CIOs want to hear, so they are looking at implementing policies and technologies to handle these issues," explains Gary Quan, CTO at Diskeeper Corp. Don't be fooled, though; many other developments are driving long hard looks at data dedupe in the business world. John Pearring, manager of sales and marketing at STORServer, says not only is the amount of data stored by organizations changing, virtualized storage in customer environments and data transfers between business locations or off-site backup locations depend on deduplicated data for the best ROI. "Add to that the nominal budget increases around IT spend and greater pressure from business units for IT to provide higher levels of service at lower cost are also playing a role," explains Phil Wandrei, senior product marketing manager at Symantec. Add to that corporate governance and regulatory requirements to store, protect, and retain data longer, and the number of reasons to look at data dedupe is on the rise. "The opportunity for data deduplication is it significantly impacts IT through both CapEx and OpEx savings by offering reductions in the cost per TB, empowering faster file restore and enhanced data protection, supporting seamless integration into existing backup environments, and offsetting the additional storage costs incurred in server virtualization," he says.