By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
April 27, 2010

With the advent of the Internet and other trailblazing technologies in recent years, companies have amassed huge amounts of data that reside on storage infrastructures, waiting to be used or uselessly gathering dust. A relatively new technology called deduplication can effectively address data growth across the enterprise, an EMC executive remarked recently.

“Research shows five-fold growth in data in just four years,” shared Ronnie Latinazo, country manager, EMC Philippines, saying this is the main underlying reason why users are keen to adopt the technology.

Deduplication—or ‘dedupe’ for short—according to Latinazo, is a data backup mechanism which identifies if certain files being saved have duplicates, and will only save it once in the simplest form of storage. “In the past, companies do 1:1 backups,” he stressed. “With deduplication, they can achieve 20:1 to as much as 500:1 backup and compression ratio.”

Two types of deduplication are available in the market today: target-based deduplication, which EMC offers through its acquisition of DataDomain, where data redundancies are taken out only before they are stored; and source-based deduplication, where redundancies are taken out even before they are sent for storage, and is offered through EMC’s Avamar solution, a backup and deduplication software in one.

Aside from lowering storage requirements, deduplication can also help firms minimize risk by doing away with expensive and unreliable tape libraries. “There is a lot of risk about tape. Just transporting the tape to the backup site poses a lot of risks,” the EMC executive explained, adding that with dedupe technology, ease of transport is not a problem as the transfer is done entirely online.

Deduplication, Latinzo said, makes backup to disk viable and efficient. “Backup used to be a space dominated by tape technology, but the problem is, you cannot do deduplication on tape,” he added.

EMC recently released what they claim is the largest and fastest inline dedupe system yet, the Data Domain Global Deduplication Array. It offers speed of up to 12.8TB/hour, up to 280TB usable capacity, and up to 270 concurrent wire streams.

The company likewise unveiled the industry’s first DataDomain Encryption Software, which provides inline encryption that protects against theft or disk loss, and replicates encrypted data using DD Replicator.

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