Contributing Editorial: Replication: The Other Half Of The Data Deduplication Equation

By Jerome Wendt and Howard Haile, DCIG LLC

The enterprise data center continues to evolve, driven by ever-growing amounts of data and new demands for data availability - local and remote. These demands are driving companies to identify alternatives to existing data protection methods with deduplicating disk-based storage systems, such as Quantum's DXi Series, becoming a preferred backup target. However deduplicating data is only half the equation. To fully deliver on enterprise data protection, companies need efficient, cost-effective options so they can move this deduplicated data off-site for long term compliance and disaster recovery, or centralize and consolidate data from remote offices.

To achieve this, companies either need to copy data from disk to tape or replicate it from one disk-based system to another. It is this second option that is catching the attention of more companies. Technologies like Symantec's NetBackup Open Storage Option are making it easier for companies to centrally manage replication between two different disk-based storage systems while deduplication reduces the amount of data that companies need to store. This data reduction process enables customers to replicate their data over bandwidth-constrained corporate LANs and WANs.