The Myths about Compression and Data Deduplication

How many of you have heard that compression and deduplication just don’t belong together? Like oil and water. I know from experience, when I worked for EMC, the Avamar sales reps and the Data Domain sales reps would tell their customers that the best thing to do if they had encrypted or compressed primary data, that they uncompress it to get the savings in their backups that deduplication promises.

This is wrong on a number… Read more »

How Much Backup Capacity Does Deduplication Really Save?

There is a lot of discussion around data deduplication for backup these days. (I wish I could deduplicate all the turkey I ate last week.) In fact, Gartner claims that “…by 2012, deduplication will be applied to 75% of backups.” And when asked “Why?” the response was “…deduplication is too compelling to ignore.” But I say “prove it”. So I put together some backup capacity numbers for storing data on tape (non-compressed and compressed) versus… Read more »

Enterprise Data Protection at the Edge

What does that really mean? When I worked for Veritas, back in 1998 we acquired a company based out of Canada called TeleBackup that backed up desktop / laptops. In 1999 Veritas acquired Seagate and the Backup Exec product which also had a desktop / laptop option. These products were meant to eventually be integrated into the main backup applications but never were. Additionally, a lot of that software was given away (hard to make… Read more »

Architecting for Recovery

Here is a shocker for you, backup IS a science. Good backup administrators / architects are worth their weight in gold. CIO’s just wish backup would go away. Backup costs money, it’s not strategic, it chews up man power and when it is 'running' (successfully or not) no one really pays attention to it, but when it fails or more likely when you need to restore data and can't, someone can lose their job -… Read more »

Deduplication - Older than You Think

So I am a big fan of National Public Radio – NPR. Today I learned that yesterday 10/29/09 was the 40th anniversary of the ‘internet’. Now, I am sure there are a number of theories on when the internet was started and who started it, but safe to say that at this time in history 40 years ago, two guys from California sent the first 5 letter message, ‘Hello’, over a wire between two computers… Read more »