Data Dedupe In A Down Economy

It is important to be hyper-focused on the economy and the prudent thing for IT professionals is to prioritize on investing in solutions that provide a real impact on reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Sounds like a no-brainer, but too often we are distracted by dealing with the status quo - conducting business as usual - which is fine when there is no crisis to face. However, the entire world is facing an economic crisis - like the falling of dominoes - and we are far from the final domino's descent. 

When making IT decisions for 2009, data dedupe should be at the top of the list because of the no-brainer value proposition - for disk-to-disk backup AND online archives. Data dedupe enables you to effectively put more data on physical disk drives with 10-to-1, 20-to-1 ratios and beyond. Not only do you save on reducing cost per GB but it also leads to lower power and cooling consumption. Data dedupe can have a major impact on operational efficiencies. It significantly lowers WAN bandwidth requirements and less bandwidth consumed means lower recurring communication costs. The cost of recovery goes way down because you don't have to go on a wild tape chase tracking down the files or database records that have been spread across multiple tapes due to interleaving or sitting in a cardboard box at Iron Mountain. 

The challenge we face in this economy is the uncertainty of the future - businesses cannot predict what will happen and often times this paralyzes us from making decisions. However, no action is indeed an action and probably among the worst we can take, especially in a crisis. 

Comments

[Rich Colbert]

You touch on some very key points. I find most companies are looking for consolidative technologies that free up as many resources as they can. As it happens, the invisible force that drives the worldwide data growth phenomenon apparently doesn't have the Bloomberg channel.

Given that, and the oft-repeated call within IT to do more with less, it is inevitable that most companies will continue to be faced with difficult decisions when it comes to data storage and protection. As a matter of due-dilligence IT managers and architects really ought to take a serious look at dedupe before making their next major storage purchase.

Deploying new storage without understanding dedupe is increasingly becoming like deploying an x86 server farm without understanding server virtualization.

[Tony Asaro]

Rich - I like your comparison. Data de-duplication is a form of virtualization - in a sense it further virtualizes data - all of the data still exists logically but consumes less physical capacity. Therefore - the value proposition of virtualization is greater optimization and utilization of our physical infrastructure. Data de-dupe does this for data and disk drives as server virtualization does this with operating systems, applications and processors.