WAN Deduplication: Get More By Sending Less

By Jeff Aaron, Silver Peak Systems

Data deduplication is one of the most significant technologies to impact the storage community in recent years. By identifying redundant data segments and storing only a single instance of information, this technology dramatically reduces storage space and allows more data to be protected over time.

But that is just the beginning. In recent years, data deduplication has also made its ways into the ranks of the networking community. More specifically, it has become an important tool for optimizing application performance across the WAN. By eliminating the transfer of repetitive IP traffic, deduplication significantly improves WAN utilization and accelerates data transfers between geographically disperse locations. This saves bandwidth costs and helps to overcome many obstacles when communicating across a WAN.

Because WAN deduplication works on all IP traffic, it plays a key role in a variety of IT initiatives, including server centralization, virtualization, and application delivery. In addition, it is essential to improving the performance and reliability of data replication, backup, and recovery across the WAN. In this respect, WAN deduplication is actually a nice complement to storage deduplication, resulting in even higher cost savings and better Recovery Point and Time Objectives (RPO/RTOs) across the enterprise.