Imagine that you are a venture capitalist hearing a pitch for a new online retail company. You have been captivated by the founders’ enthusiasm and are ready to make an offer, until you hear the proposed shipping strategy. The plan is to ship the entire store’s inventory to customers every time they want to make a purchase, so that they can identify what they would like to purchase in their homes. Would you fund that company?
You don’t have to be seasoned investor to recognize that this strategy would be unprofitable. It is obvious that sending every item in an online store’s catalogue to each customer instead of just the specific items that they desire would be horribly inefficient. The costs would be exorbitant and the employees involved would be driven mad.
But in the world of data protection, it is common to see backup administrators relying on a strategy not too different from this scenario when backing up their data. You see, while standard post-process deduplication revolutionized data protection by only storing unique data to disk, there are still even greater efficiencies that can be achieved. With traditional deduplication technology, all of the data on the server still needs to be sent over the network every time a backup is run so that unique data can be identified. Similar to the flawed online retail model, this inefficient process results in excruciatingly lengthy procedures that will bog down your network. Backup admins that take advantage of the full power of EMC’s data protection solutions benefit from deduplication comparable to a premium online retailer that offers free overnight delivery. With EMC’s Data Domain Deduplication storage systems along with Data Domain Boost, backup admins are able to make use of advanced distributed deduplication for an incredibly efficient backup.
DD Boost enables client-side deduplication, which distributes parts of the deduplication process up the data path. Specifically, the backup or application server gains the ability to identify unique data segments before any data is sent over the network. Adopting client-side deduplication will enable 50% faster backups, and the relieved strain on the network will be appreciated as the amount of data transferred is reduced by up to 99%. This is possible because instead of immediately sending all of the data over the network and mirroring the flawed retail model, DD Boost enabled application server only sends unique data (that hasn’t been backed up yet) to the Data Domain system. To learn more about the various types of deduplication, please view my Lightboard video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJLY5PixmCk
If you are a backup admin that hasn’t yet embraced client-side deduplication, it is time for a new strategy. Trust me—if you were a delivery person dealing with shipping an entire online retailer’s inventory, you would be saying the same thing. Embrace the power of deduplication and enhance your environment.
