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Companies are drowning in data. Each year, most companies are seeing significant increases in the amount of data they need to store. Before you know it, your backup storage repositories can fill up, forcing you to make the hard decisions: Do you purchase more storage? - In today’s age of tight budgets, many IT organizations simply cannot afford to purchase additional storage. Do you delete older data that you currently store, freeing up more storage space? - This is not an option for many companies. Deleting older data may put the company at risk for compliance violations, the inability to meet the company’s SLA requirements, and in certain circumstances, preventing an ability to fully restore a company’s data or systems. Or Do you reduce the amount of redundant data you store? - Take control of your storage sprawl and use the storage your company already has in a more efficient and smarter way. Reduce the amount of redundant data that is living in your stored data. Reducing your redundant data makes sense. Today, there are new technologies available that that can help to reduce the size of the data that is stored on your backup repositories, most notably data deduplication and data compression. Data deduplication, a feature found in many of today’s backup solutions, can eliminate duplicate blocks of data, or redundant data, from being stored in the backup repository. Data compression can compress the data in your backup repository so it takes up less space. A benefit of deduplication is that empty disk blocks that have been allocated to a VM but have not been written to by the guest operating system are ignored and not backed up. There are different methods for doing data deduplication and not all backup products support it or include it natively. One of the most common methods is in-line deduplication. In-line deduplication is done in real-time, hash calculations are done before blocks are stored in the backup repository and then, if they match a disk block already stored; they reference that one and are not stored again. While this is beneficial to reducing backup sizes it can cause some extra overhead while backups are running since hash calculations have to be made on each disk block.
Many of today’s backup solutions will support multiple compression levels. Compression will shrink a data volume’s size down. The downside of compression is that it is very CPU intensive and can significantly increase backup times and may require multiple CPU cores on the backup server to reach optimal compression. Before selecting a backup solution, look to see if it can help you control your ever expanding data and can help you optimize the data you need to store. To see deduplication in action for backup and recovery, download a free trial of AppAssure Backup & Replication software in action.
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