Enterprise Benefits of Data Deduplication

According to this report from Information Week, based on a new study, the benefits of dedupe can be significant if applied to the right data set. The effectiveness of dedupe is highly dependent on the makeup of your data. For some apps, such as disk-to-disk backups of data sets that change slowly, including e-mail systems, dedupe can be very effective.

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"Some vendors perform deduplication on the data stream as it's sent to the appliance and before it's written to disk (in-line). Others perform post-process deduplication--after data is written to disk. As is the case with most architectural differences, each side claims superiority. In-line deduplication may have lower initial storage capacity requirements, since a full 'undeduped' copy of the data is never written. Post-process deduplication, on the other hand, requires more initial space, but it may be more easily integrated with various storage systems and is the way to go if you want to apply deduplication to existing files and storage.

"The effectiveness of dedupe is highly dependent on the makeup of your data. For some apps, such as disk-to-disk backups of data sets that change slowly, including e-mail systems, dedupe can be very effective. Compression rates of 30 to 1 or even higher aren't uncommon. Another advantage of deduplication is streamlined replication and disaster recovery capabilities. After an initial backup, only changed blocks are backed up and written to disk during subsequent jobs, consuming significantly less storage. Because backups are full (not differential or incremental), recovery operations are simpler and quicker, improving recovery time objectives. Furthermore, off-site replication to another device requires significantly less bandwidth, opening up additional disaster recovery options."

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