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One of the greatest qualities of data de-duplication1 is that its value is easy to quantify. If you can reduce the amount of capacity needed to store backup data by 10:1, 30:1, or greater, all you have to do is pull out your calculator and put a dollar amount to the cost-savings. However, while these numbers can be significant and may be enough for some organizations to move forward, they only tell part of the data de-duplication cost-savings story. A complete ROI analysis should include both the hard and soft cost-savings of deploying de-duplication. In fact, the soft costs alone—the value of increased retention, operational efficiencies and time to protection—can be very compelling.
Hard Dollars
The hard dollar costs are easy to determine. The first metric is the reduced capital cost of the D2D backup solution with and without data de-duplication. The D2D backup solution will require more actual capacity to store backups—in some cases, 20 or more times what the data de-duplication-enabled solution needs. There are other capital cost savings as well. D2D backup solutions can reduce the amount of tape infrastructure you acquire. Some end-users have totally eliminated tape, while others have reduced the number of tape libraries they maintain. If you want to perform remote replication between your primary and remote sites, then data de-duplication can significantly reduce your WAN bandwidth costs. Since there is ultimately less data backed up, you can effectively replicate data over long distances with far less bandwidth. Since WAN bandwidth is still expensive and a recurring cost, data de-duplication can significantly improve the economics of implemented remote backup and disaster recovery.
It is also important to consider facility costs, which include power and cooling as well as floor space. Since you are using fewer disks, you are creating less heat and drawing less power. Again, at a 20:1 capacity reduction ratio, this can mean significant savings. In some cases, there are data centers that just can’t use up any more power—they are at or near their maximum limits. These companies should certainly evaluate data de-duplication-enabled solutions. Additionally, floor space is at a premium. Data de-duplication-enabled solutions can reduce vertical growth by minimizing the amount of shelf space needed to store backup data. Users can eliminate some or all of their tape libraries by moving to disk, which will free up floor space. Data de-duplication enables you to use less capacity to store backup data, but it also reduces the amount of processing power, bandwidth and memory per GB. This impacts all of the aforementioned factors that make data de-duplication-enabled solutions easy to cost justify.
Value of Increased Retention
ESG has found that the majority of end-users still use tape backup as their main method of disaster recovery. However, we’ve also found that end-users consider the process of recovering data from tape to be slow, complex and unreliable. These two realities are clearly at odds with one another. Recovering a single file from tape can take several minutes, whereas recovering data from disk is instantaneous. Multiply this by dozens, hundreds and even thousands of files and the performance difference can be several hours, days and even weeks. Consider database tables that span multiple tapes and the process of trying to recover this information quickly. Consider the process of tape interleaving, which improves tape backup performance, but impacts restore performance because server data is spread randomly across the tapes. Additionally, recovery performance is greatly impacted by tape availability—whether it is within the library or offsite in a box somewhere far away.
The fact that end-users are unsure whether they can actually recover 100% of their data from tape is another harsh reality. The very purpose of backing up your data is so you can recover if needed. Backing up data onto disk resolves recovery and reliability issues. Data de-duplication increases the amount of backup data that you can retain and extends the retention period. In effect, by using data de-duplication-enabled D2D backup solutions, you can eliminate the need for ever having to restore from tape again. That should be the objective of every IT organization—removing the slow, error prone, high touch tape process and replacing it with modern solutions that provide fast, reliable and automated protection.
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