Reduce storage costs with deduplication

SEP File-interface Deduplication System Virtual Appliance (SEP FDS VA), powered by FalconStor, is a block-level data deduplication and replication solution that provides a space-efficient repository for SEP sesam DataStores.

SEP FDS VA can reduce your back-up management costs by dramatically reducing (1) your disk storage needs; (2) your data centre power consumption (+ air conditioning costs); (3) your dependency on tape; and (4) your off-site tape storage costs by enabling you to achieve longer retention periods on disk, and facilitating replication of your back-ups to meet off-site requirements.

In today's business environments, many administrators face increased challenges in protecting their vital data from loss, theft, corruption and disaster. Traditional back-up operations constantly reproduce data for protection and recovery purposes, therefore the amount of data keeps increasing and IT costs for disk storage keep rising.

With the introduction of SEP FDS VA, it is now possible to control data growth resulting from producing multiple copies of the same back-up data. SEP FDS VA is a block-level data deduplication tool that provides a space-efficient back-up repository for all kinds of data.

SEP FDS VA was built with performance in mind. Its post processing and concurrent block-level deduplication technology is optimised to ingest back-up data without affecting back-up speed. Its concurrent processing options allow the deduplication process to take place in the background, while its file interface maintains the high performance characteristics needed to meet the back-up window.

Deduplication processes can be set by the SEP sesam Management Interface to start immediately after the back-up, or can be scheduled to occur at a set time on a regular basis. This flexibility allows the end-user to accommodate different operations on non-duplicated data such as data copies, restore operations, or other operations such as migration to tape storages for long-term repositories.

SEP FDS VA is optimised to enable high-performance data access for both non-deduplicated data as well as deduplicated data. This allows quick back-up data restore processes when needed. Data is striped across the deduplication repository to maximise read operation performance. In addition, the data deduplication repository has direct block-level access with no file system overhead, resulting in no performance degradation during read operations.

SEP FDS VA can scale from a small footprint deployment up to petabytes of logical storage capacity. Its physical managed capacity can scale from 1TB up to 64TB of deduplication repository in a single node.

SEP FDS VA offers global deduplication capability for quick and cost-effective disaster recovery deployments. Connecting remote offices via SEP FDS VA appliances allows organisations to eliminate tape shipments between sites and ensures that data is readily available online when needed. SEP FDS VA is enabled with intelligent global data replication technology. Unique data is sent only once from remote sites to the main SEP sesam Backup Server. This WAN-optimisation method allows cost-effective data replication and significant bandwidth savings - up to 97% reduction in production bandwidth usage.

During deduplication, the system analyses blocks of data and determines whether the data is unique or has already been copied to the SEP FDS VA repository. The process then passes only single instances of unique data to the SEP FDS VA repository and replaces each deduplicated file with a stub file, whose function is to point to the repository and is used to retrieve stored data.

The SEP sesam Management Interface displays the backed up files in their real format to make the restore process usual and simple. A reason for block-level type deduplication instead of a file-based deduplication is that a block-level solution examines small sub-blocks and this is making it far more effective at reducing storage consumption.