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Data managers are finding themselves in a crisis. Data volumes are growing exponentially every year. According to Paul P. Tallon, professor of information systems at Boston College, “Corporate data is estimated to be growing at over five exabytes per annum.”1 Companies are not only generating more primary data, they are required to back up and retain that data many times over its life cycle. This process creates even larger volumes of data to be managed. With a retention period of one year for weekly full backups and 10 days for daily incremental backups, a single terabyte (TB) of data requires 53 TB of capacity for data protection over its life cycle.
At the same time, senior managers and regulators are demanding higher levels of service, longer online retention times, and higher levels of data protection. Many data centers have simply run out of space, power, and cooling capacity. According to a recent Gartner report, “By 2008, 50 percent of current data centers will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high-density equipment.”
The rising cost of power, the increased power requirements of dense rack systems, and the shortage of power capacity are converging to make reducing power consumption a critical goal for data center managers. Gartner predicts that “through 2009, energy costs will emerge as the second highest operating cost in 70 percent of worldwide data center facilities.
Few IT budgets are keeping pace with this growth or with rising energy costs, labor costs, and other operational costs. The bottom line: data managers have more data to protect and much less time, space, and money allocated to protecting it than ever before.
This paper will compare the cost and efficiency of a SEPATON S2100 data deduplication software to other common backup and recovery technologies. It will demonstrate that an S2100-ES2 VTL with DeltaStor software can not only address all of an enterprise’s data back up and recovery needs, it can also save as much as 88 percent of the associated operating costs.
Meeting Data Center Needs
Today’s enterprise data managers need a solution that can meet a variety of complex data protection needs while containing costs in the data center. Specifically, they need a solution that:
- Backs up data fast enough to stay within shrinking windows
- Meets more stringent SLAs by maintaining data, document and application availability
- Addresses “green” environmental initiatives by using less power and floor space
- Enables them to meet regulatory requirements for data security, retention times, and restore times
- Automates manual tasks and eliminates staff intervention to reduce labor costs
- Enables simple, affordable scalability of both performance and capacity as data volumes grow exponentially
- Ensures data integrity throughout backup, retention, and restore processes
Data Protection Options
For enterprises with more than 50 TB of data to back up and restore, data managers have several options of data protection to choose from. The first option is to use LTO-3 tape libraries, a proven technology that is in most data centers today. The second option is to use multiple socalled simple virtual tape library systems. These systems were designed for small to mediumsized companies and have a maximum performance of less than 1 TB per hour and a maximum usable capacity of less than 20 TB per appliance. They offer both faster backup performance than tape and data deduplication—a software technology that dramatically reduces capacity requirements by eliminating the need to store duplicate data.
The third option is to add deduplication software to a disk-to-disk solution. However, the slow performance of this type of solution (<1.6 TB per hour for backups) and added complexity (it requires a third-party integrator and hardware from multiple vendors) make it an unrealistic option for an enterprise-class data center.
The fourth option is to move to an enterprise-class virtual tape library technology with at least 50 TB per appliance of usable capacity and performance of more than 11.5 TB per hour. Of the leading VTLs in this category, only SEPATON ContentAware solutions offers deduplication. For that reason, SEPATON is treated as a separate option for comparison purposes in this paper.
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