Greg White is a Senior Manager of Product Marketing, focusing on Data Management and Protection. He has worked in in the technology industry in brand and product marketing for the last decade helping organizations of all sizes, verticals and geographies solve their IT challenges. Over the last six years, Greg has gained specific knowledge and experience in the enterprise application and storage areas where he has helped businesses find solutions for their data growth, data management, and data protection problems.

Jeff Dorr is a Senior Manager currently focused on data protection product marketing for CommVault. Over the past 10 years, Jeff has led efforts in several companies to develop, introduce, and manage market leading hardware, software, and services that really help users improve their data protection environment.

Deduplication's Other, Often Overlooked, Benefits – in a DASH

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

By Greg White

Deduplication is a topic that could, and has, filled volumes, but I'm going to try and keep this discussion short, sweet and fast, like Dash from The Incredibles. By now just about everyone that has anything to do with data protection, management or storage has heard about dedupe. They've also probably answered a survey or two about their state of awareness, or whether they have considered or purchased this technology. The hype cycle is starting to wane and most folks in IT are now at the point where they are ensuring the "check box" for dedupe is included in their plans. Most of these people have heard the arguments for how it will help them:

• Optimize current storage investments for backup due to the large, recurring and highly duplicative data sets
• Enhance protection by enabling the ability to keep more backup copies using the same amount of storage,
• Delay the need to buy more storage, even though data is growing rapidly
• Alleviate the headaches around protecting this expanding data within finite backup windows – that often couldn't be met already

But what often gets overlooked are the benefits deduplication can provide when it comes to disaster recovery, information access and, at a more basic level, how copies of backup data are distributed across the environment (a.k.a. retention). If you can take your backup data sets and efficiently put copies of them in other locations on cheaper storage solutions you can enhance protection, reduce costs, add flexibility and increase access for your data. This is something we at CommVault embraced fully with the launch of Simpana 9. Last year, customers kept telling us how our philosophy of modern data protection, along with a technology that actually executes on it would help them operationally, financially and strategically; ultimately providing them the ability to focus more time and resources on meeting their organizational goals and less on the day-to-day break-fix of data protection.

So, how does CommVault make this work? Well, simply – you can use Simpana 9's 3rd generation, global, source and target deduplication coupled with Deduplication Accelerated Streaming Hash, a.k.a. "DASH" (see – everything comes full circle), to have independent retention periods for copies of backup data that can be efficiently distributed across the enterprise. This enables IT staff to centrally manage and move data to multiple locations on different storage hardware with different retention periods to meet retention, access, recovery and protection requirements. The diagram below depicts an example of a data center replicating copies to three places to meet different retention and recovery needs.

There's a reason we called it DASH – because you can do it fast by avoiding the rehydrate / reprocessing steps and just move the changed block/segments relative to the deduplication database (DDB) destination. Additionally, DASH enables you to create much faster and much less resource-intensive Synthetic Full backups.

DASH functionality in Simpana software can help you eliminate the added complexities of host or storage replication, like breaking mirrors, creating clones, attaching volumes, getting bogged down in scripts, etc., and help you meet recovery and retention requirements without paying the penalty of having to rehydrate data first and then deduplicate it again on the backend. Ultimately, you can enhance data protection and recovery while at the same time reducing costs, adding flexibility and increasing access for your data.

I encourage you to check out the demo to learn about the benefits and ease of use of Simpana 9 deduplication and think about how it can help you in more than just the situations that are usually highlighted when the topic of deduplication is brought up.

Greg White is a Senior Manager of Product Marketing at CommVault.

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