Finding the right fit for your organisation

In addition to the adoption of aggressive virtualisation strategies, IT managers are faced with an entirely new set of challenges.

A key challenge that has begun to impact back-up performance is the amount of data that must be protected within the available back-up window. Traditional solutions are inefficient in most cases because they back up everything including duplicate data files and sub-file data segments.

More importantly, the impact is extremely severe in a virtualised environment and remote offices where each virtual machine represents an individual back-up job, often with concurrent or overlapping back-up windows, and includes redundant operating-system, application and file data. As a result, back-ups for virtual machines can often overrun back-up windows and tax shared resources.

Any cost savings gained from hardware consolidation is offset by the exposure of being unable to protect one's environment under current SLAs. Thus, IT managers are looking towards data de-duplication as a simplified approach and solution to managing data growth.

Using Data De-Duplication for Backup: An effective data de-duplication product will help organisations cope with backing up information stores by removing data that is redundant to economise the storage and disaster-recovery requirements for data.

Some of the business benefits derived from an investment in data de-duplication include:

Lower infrastructure costs: By eliminating redundant data from the back-up, far less infrastructure is required to hold the back-up images. Smaller capacity requirements means lower acquisition costs, reduced power and cooling costs and the ability to minimise network-bandwidth requirements and costs.

Improved data protection: Data de-duplication enables many organisations to create daily full back-up images while only consuming a fraction of the storage capacity required for even an incremental/ differential back-up.

Many of these organisations had been forced to do weekly full and daily incremental due to back-up window constraints. As a result, restoration and recovery took much longer as each day only represented a partial recovery.

Thada Savetsila is the country manager of EMC Information Systems (Thailand).