A business case for dedpulicating data

The growth of organisational data and the advent of cloud computing has changed the face of backup and recovery.

This is according to Gordon Love, Symantec's regional manager for Africa, and Gregg Brans, an appliance specialist at the company.

Brans noted that organisations used to back up to tape, but with the rate of data growth, they started backing up to disc, as this allowed for much faster backup times.

Love, citing IDC figures, added that data is growing at an annual rate of 60% year-on-year for large organisations, while SMEs are seeing annual data volume growth of 178%.

With the advent of cloud computing, Brans said organisations have started using appliances to pull data over the network, and back up to the cloud, while deduplicating data (a process that eliminates redundant data) at the target.

However, according to Brans, when data is deduplicated at the source, where the backup is made, less data has to traverse the network, thus reducing bandwidth costs.

For this reason, he said, deduplication should be performed both at the source, where the backup is made, and at the target, where the backup is saved.

According to Brans, Symantec is driving the evolution to deduplicate data at the source with its NetBackup 5220 application.

Love said the NetBackup 5220 is an integrated hardware and software application that organisations can control from a single dashboard.

According to Love, the NetBackup 5220 is able to reduce an organisation's total cost of ownership.

He says this is because the appliance is able to deduplicate at source and at target, reducing the amount of bandwidth an organisation requires to perform a backup. He adds that, because the data is deduplicated at the source, backup times are also significantly reduced.

Brans also pointed out that the NetBackup 5220 can be used as an enabler for disaster recovery, utilising cloud technology. For example, he said, the application gives organisations the ability to replicate from one media server, or from an appliance, to a media server or appliance sitting at the disaster recovery site.

According to Love, organisations often only have an understanding of what disaster recovery measures they have in place once something goes wrong.

Brans said it is also important that organisations have a thorough understanding of the business risk associated with the various applications that an organisation is running. He said companies should categorise the level of service that each application requires in comparison to the risk to the business of losing that application.

Love also pointed out that CIOs often spend as much as 60% of their IT budgets on storage. He explained that many organisations save multiple copies of documents and presentations, when one saved copy would suffice. According to him, this situation is compounded when organisations do not perform incremental backups, making backups of backups instead, which results in a tremendous need for storage.

Love argued that CIOs are often too scared to delete files. However, he suggested that when companies deduplicate their backups, CIOs are able to delete files with confidence, knowing the files are safely backed up.