In an industry littered with initials and acronyms, every week some technology is announced as the latest candidate for the “NBT” (Next Big Thing) award. Unfortunately, many an innovation has failed to live up to the hype, so it’s refreshing to note that one of the recent NBT candidates is proving worthy of the lofty designation.
Data Deduplication deserves NBT status. “Data Dedupe” has become a well recognized moniker in the storage lexicon. As with most great ideas, the reasoning is simple: Data dedupe provides easier access, faster restores and longer-term, near-line retention of backup data.
Need more proof, like the “real world” kind? The Girls Scouts of the USA experienced a storage surge of more than 50 percent over the past year. While this overtaxed the existing tape-based data protection system, it was noted that a lot of the information—including similar system information for 100 Microsoft Windows 2003 file servers, a mission-critical SQL database containing four years of historical and one year of current membership data, as well as an ever-increasing data warehouse—was redundant. This is a perfect application for data dedupe. Now, GSUSA is using the REO 9500D to lower the cost of backing up redundant data with a drop-in appliance that saves their sole backup administrator substantial time and effort.
Vistage International, the world’s leading chief executive organization, is poised to retain months of data on disk to optimize storage capacity while also lowering the costs of protecting streaming media content. An early adopter of the REO 9500D, the company is achieving data deduplication ratios of 10:1 and better, and they expect the ratio to increase as they perform more backups. The end result is they’ll be able to meet tough retention objectives while reducing reliance on offsite tapes and improving customer service levels. And I shouldn’t forget to mention: the deployment took under an hour and the benefits were immediate.
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Jeff Graham
Senior Product Manager