Each year there tends to be one technology that stands out in the storage space. In 2009 it was data deduplication. At the end of 2008 EMC made an acquisition of a source based deduplicaiton solution called Avamar. Later, in 2009, they announced a strategic partnership with Quantum for data deduplication at the target. Then in 2009 EMC made a bid against NetApp for Data Domain and won. In addition, NetApp had data deduplication announcements… Read more »
Compressed Thoughts - A History of Capacity Optimization
Users and Vendors alike have always had skepticism around capacity optimization and different points throughout history. The key, for end users is to be able to answer the questions:
What are you doing to my data? - This is directly related to availability and data integrity. If you can't ensure the customer will always have access to their data and it will be 'their' data then there is an issue.Whatever you do to my data… Read more »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 »