The Devaluation of Deduplication
Greetings! In our last post, Tom Cook, our CEO and President, joined Jered as a Permabit blogger. I too am now joining the blogging ranks. My name is Mike Ivanov and I am the Vice President of Marketing for Permabit.
As we look further ahead into 2009, it will be interesting to see the devaluation of point products focused on deduplication. It is clear, now more than ever, that dedupe is simply a technology that will be core to many software and hardware systems and not a standalone product. Note the latest release from CommVault highlighting that they now can do dedupe and even claim to do it across disk and tape. Permabit was a pioneer in deduplication technology dating back to 2000. The patented technology has been shipping as a feature in our products since 2004. We call our technology Scalable Data Reduction™.
This has me wondering about all the investments companies made in dedupe backup devices over the last several years and what will happen once they fill up with backup data. Yes, the vendors claim to get outrageous deduplication ratios, but it’s no wonder why. If you keep backing the same data up over and over again, of course you’re going to have duplicate information. Deduping redundant backup data isn’t solving the actual problem! It’s treating the symptom.
When I speak with customers, I ask the fundamental question: “why are you backing up all your data in the first place?” Pick any latest and greatest analyst report and they will all say the same thing. User’s primary storage is bloated with static information that hasn’t been accessed in the last 90 days (even as short as 15 to 30 days for some). Yet, there it sits consuming space on your most expensive tier of storage. And to make matters worse, it’s being backed up over and over again. How many copies of that same static piece of information do you need? How much time does this add to your backup window every week? How much extra are you spending on backup media? How much stress are you putting on your network capacity? What about your people managing this process? Most importantly, how much more expensive primary storage are you planning to buy this year to hold more static information that should be moved to a less expensive storage tier?
This is why we believe 2009 will be the year dedupe for backup will really be exposed for what it is, a treatment of the symptom not the problem! Once the appliance fills up, it’s time to go shopping again. But this time around, we’d like people to solve the real problem. Archive, migrate, move – whatever you want to call it – but get the old (static) information off your primary tier and move it to a much more economical, reliable, and scalable tier of disk storage. Whether you call it Tier 2/3, Archive Tier, Content Storage, Utility Storage – the time is now, with the budget restraints everyone has, to solve the real problem.
Before you buy more primary storage or another dedupe backup appliance, take a look at the Permabit Enterprise Archive. It can save you tons of money in your IT budget this year and allow you to take on more strategic initiatives rather than deal with the same old backup problems. Let us show you how with our free professional services assessment. We will analyze your data and show you how much static information you have. We will also determine the amount of data reduction you can actually achieve and with your costs determine the amount of savings. The price is right and the time is now!