RenovoData Weekly Articles

Today’s recessed economy has prompted many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to look into data deduplication as a cost-effective way to transition into disk-based data backup.  Data deduplication reduces storage requirements by eliminating redundant data and is applicable to most businesses throughout various industries.   With data deduplication, storage devices only store changes to data.  

Dissatisfaction with the manageability of tape-based backup is a major reason SMBs choose data deduplication technology.  Larger organizations often have a bigger budget with more established processes and higher product availability.  Tape backup is resource – intensive, considering people, time and money.  Additionally, tape is unreliable with slow restoration and high security risks.   So for SMBs looking to adequately protect their mission-critical data with faster recoverability, disk backup has proven to provide stronger benefits.

Historically, disk storage has been a relatively expensive option for SMBs when compared to tape.  However, although the cost of disk capacity has dropped considerably in recent years, tape is still a cheaper option initially.  Conversely, data deduplication allows SMBs to gain more storage capacity out of fewer hard drives which helps make the switch from tape to disk more economically attractive.

Employ a remote backup company which leverages data deduplication technology.  In addition to increased security through industry-grade data encryption, faster restores and greater reliability, SMBs experience increased operational savings as well as productivity gains.  Disk-to-disk backup with data deduplication provides the ability to instantaneously verify that data has been backed up while reducing costs and space utilization.

In just this past year alone, the business environment has shifted dramatically.  Along with a tighter economy comes increased scrutiny of IT budgets.  However, while many IT projects may be decreased along with budgets, the amount of data that is created and maintained by an organization continues to grow exponentially.  The dramatic surge in data protection and data storage needs is a result of increased electronic communication applications and other information moving to digital format.  As businesses look to grow from a need to store gigabytes to terabytes, data center space and power are more and more expensive.  In today’s economy, the combination of cost, operational and legislative pressures are driving businesses to look at more cost-effective data storage technologies and data management solutions.

Data deduplication is the latest technology that has been embraced by users as they struggle to control data growth and distribution.  By eliminating redundant data objects, an immediate benefit is realized through space efficiencies.  Consequently, lower storage space requirements will save money on disk expenditures.  The more efficient use of disk space also allows for longer disk utilization periods, better recovery time objectives (RTO) and a reduction of data that must be sent across a WAN for remote backups, replication and disaster recovery.

Despite the downward economic spiral, businesses are experiencing accelerated data growth; with that comes a need for fast, reliable remote backup solutions such as those which are a part of data deduplication.  Likewise, tough economic times present greater chances for data security threats.  In additional to cost savings, data deduplication provides the ability to instantaneously verify that data has been backed up.  It also provides higher security, faster restores and shorter backup windows.  Operational savings and productivity gains are compelling factors to consider when debating on data deduplication.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was enacted as an effort to boost the national economy out of a prolonged recession. The Act proposes a $787 billion economic stimulus package which contains a number of items that likely will offer grants for organizations that invest in green IT solutions. Below are specific areas that may hold potential funding opportunities for spend allocated to IT data recovery solutions.

 

Digitizing Health Records.  The medical industry is facing new mandates to make patient records more secure. $19 billion will be allocated for modernizing healthcare record-keeping and implementing health information technology to lower costs and improve quality. Doctors’ practices will receive between $44,000 and $64,000 in incentives to computerize medical records, and hospitals will get as much as $11 million each. A reliable remote backup company helps meet the critical need for secure offsite backup, server virtualization for disaster recovery remote backup storage solutions which the government mandates as a uniform, nationwide benchmark in patient record-keeping and compliance.

IT Energy Efficiency.  Energy providers will provide significant incentives for entities that
implement projects toward reducing energy consumption. $20 billion in tax rewards for energy
efficiency projects will be awarded out of the stimulus. An offsite data backup company that provides economic and ecological solutions through server virtualization and data deduplication helps reduce energy utilization and simplifies the IT infrastructure within an organization.

 

The proposed budget allocations from the economic stimulus presents a big move to areas such as healthcare, energy and the environment.  There is an underlying indication that IT solutions like those offered by an offsite data backup and IT disaster recovery services provider helps meet efficiency standards through providing more streamlined operations and meeting stringent security and governmental regulations regarding data protection.  The proposed benefits of the economic stimulus offers further encouragement that now is the time for “greening” IT practices and taking vigilant steps to ensure sound data loss prevention measures are put into place.

                                                     

The second part of the two-part series on “Green IT” for disaster recovery focuses on data deduplication.  In going green, deduplication provides the capabilities to address power, cooling and space consumption challenges by optimizing disk capacity and storing more data with less space.  Reducing the space utilization in a disk-to-disk backup system increases power efficiency and decreases cooling costs. 

Data Deduplication

Data deduplication compares segments of data being written to disk storage with previously stored data segments and removes all unnecessary duplicate files.  It is a data reduction technique that makes storage more efficient and dramatically reduces expenses for the entire IT infrastructure.

Key Benefits of Data Deduplication 

Save Power and Cooling Costs.   Tapes stack up over time, requiring more storage space.  Deduplication reduces the overall footprint by using less storage with the exact same amount of information.   

 

Increase Retention Capacity with Less Waste.  Deduplication’s elimination of unnecessary files allows the ability to store critical business and regulatory files for a long-term, at a fraction of the space within the datacenter.

 

Improve Disaster Recovery (DR).   There is less bandwidth needed to replicate data.   Also, if you send less, you store less on the other side; which relates to storages costs, as well as power and cooling of the DR location.

 

Lessen CO₂ Emissions.  Trucks are not required to ship bulky tapes offsite.  Therefore, there is no gasoline being used to transport disks to an offsite location.

 

An offsite data backup company with innovative deduplication and virtualization technologies allows increased IT flexibility and frees up datacenters from the shortcomings of a static, physical IT infrastructure.  Choosing a reliable and efficient remote backup service provider makes “greening” the IT organization simple and efficient.