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Top Storage Team Challenges
In TheInfoPro’s research, Storage professionals have consistently named managing storage growth, proper capacity reporting and planning, and backup management as the top pains facing their Storage organizations. The use of a storage target that identifies redundancy in incoming data streams and only saves those segments identified as unique, thereby conserving space, would clearly help with respect to the #1 pain, managing storage growth. In addition, since deduplication is the process of examining data for patterns, then identifying and storing only the unique data, it can help with respect to capacity planning – a key activity in capacity planning is the discovery of usage patterns. And finally, archiving duplicated content reduces the backup load, easing the strain of backup management.
Deduplication means longer onsite retention, and thus less reliance on tape. According to TheInfoPro’s Wave 10 Storage research, almost 50% of Fortune 1000 Storage organizations require more than 1,000 tapes for a single data center recovery. More than 15% of a Backup team’s time is focused on tape management, while close to 60% of Storage teams are backing up over 450 TB of content per month. As the pain of backup administration continues to escalate, deduplication technology maintains the promise of minimizing this pain by reducing necessary hardware, complexity, and manual effort.
Deduplication and Tiering
One of the challenging aspects of deduplication is determining where to deploy the technology. Some end users talk about initially deploying out-of-band or archiving applications, while at the same time, others are quite excited about in-band or online deployments. The trend among the Fortune 1000 is to apply deduplication first to the archive. Not surprisingly, these archive deduplication tiers are projected to be the fastest-growing tiers for 2008. This growth helps contribute to the popularity of tiered storage build-out, the top Storage initiative.
Backup Redesign
The promise of new systems that actively identify and help manage storage growth, the possibility of minimizing the ever-increasing tape management nightmare, and the expansion of archiving and replication protection are key reasons why Storage teams cited backup redesign as a top Storage initiative.
When end users describe their backup redesign goals and motivations, they talk about consolidation and the desire to minimize their dependence on tape, while looking to simplify replication and reduce the necessary level of effort expended on backup. Deduplication technology fits squarely with these goals.
State of Current Deduplication Environments
Over the last two years, deduplication has started to solidify its role in the data center. As mentioned on the previous pages, deduplication deployments have been targeted for email and semi-structured content with a high probability of duplication. In their product evaluations, end users have mentioned that products that sustain the highest duplication effectiveness are the most valued, as noted in Chart 9. But this does not mean that introducing deduplication can continue without any consideration for the impact on backup windows, recovery windows, and backup software integration, all of which follow closely behind deduplication compression / compaction effectiveness as the most important deduplication functionalities.
For the Storage teams that deployed deduplication technology in 2007, the average repository (compressed) is roughly 20 TB, and has an average effectiveness of 20:1. This represents about 400 TB of content, making the ROI and TCO justification pretty simple – so simple, in fact, that end users are starting to demand deduplication technology in file systems, document managers, email software, block storage arrays, and NAS. The span of 2008 and 2009 will clearly be an interesting time frame, one which will put a greater emphasis on storage arrays with intelligence, in addition to high capacity capability.
Deduplication Technology Adoption Patterns
According to the most recent research, 15% of Storage organizations have deduplication technology already deployed, and 59% of Storage organizations are planning on deploying deduplication technology by the end of 2008. Additionally, of the 15% that deployed the technology in 2007, over half plan on expanding the deployment in 2008. Email archiving systems, disk-to-disk (D2D) snapshots, department file servers, and applications with high levels of duplicated content are the initial targets.
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