Why deduplication will continue to drive sales in the channel

In part the market for deduplication is being driven by the sheer amount of digital information being created, which last year grew three percent faster, or 16 million gigabytes more, than prior projections. In fact, IDC estimates that by 2012 there could be five times as much digital information being created than there is today.

But while times remain tough and IT budgets continue to be stretched further than before the adoption of new technologies isn’t high on priority lists. Instead the short-term focus is falling on the channel to prove the value of any proposed technologies as customers want to be sure of maximising any investments and almost expect an immediate return from any spend by whilst also avoiding major disruption or unnecessary complexity. With eDiscovery, compliance and SLA requirements still driving data storage requirements up, there really couldn’t be a better time for our channel partners to be confidently positioning deduplication as the solution that reduces storage pressures.

For those that aren’t already familiar with the concept, data deduplication, or intelligent compression, is a method of reducing storage by eliminating redundant data and works by retaining one unique instance of the data on either a disk or tape. The benefits of adopting such an intuitively integrated software approach are immediate cost-effective scaling and system performance improvements across the entire data management infrastructure.
In the face of rising power and cooling requirements alongside escalating data growth rates, deduplication also offers a game changing advantage for resellers whose customers are asking with help to reduce the footprint of long-term vaulting or compliance copies. The compressed state of the deduplicated data can be transparently migrated to tiers of cheaper storage for longer retention needs, enabling resellers to then offer a service that reduces storage space dedicated to backup and archive, on both disk and tape, by up to 90 percent.
Unlike a dedicated appliance-based solution the latest embedded software deduplication tools mean the benefits of block-level deduplication can now be distributed over the end-to-end data movement cycle and will stretch across an entire organisation’s backup and archive data flow, quickly and effectively with minimal outlay.
If further persuasion is needed, another business benefit of dedupe is that out-of-control storage costs, and slow throughput on backup and archiving systems, can be addressed. Lengthily recovery times, a particularly common issue when it involves archived data stored outside the primary backup media, also represent opportunities for the reseller to sell here. Deduplication can also be the answer to remove the cost, risk and the complexity of sending tapes to disaster recovery (DR) sites.
So as a solution, software dedupe embraces tape infrastructure and disk tiers and, as a more efficient utilisation of a customer’s secondary storage infrastructure, can eliminate incremental storage purchases for backup and archive for anywhere up to a year.
Interestingly, and for debating with customer perhaps, whilst CommVault anticipates the adoption of deduplication will eliminate incremental tape drive purchases by anything up to six months, tape is certainly not dead. In fact, as an organisation, CommVault expects to see deduplication continuing to drive tape sales in the long term. In this scenario, even the cost of incremental tapes is a small price to pay when compared with the unprecedented operational efficiencies that such an end-to-end approach would bring - from faster network data transfers and shorter backup windows, to improved recoveries, which all translate directly into cost savings that resellers can then deliver to customers. Not only does this give the reseller in question two big ticks in the boxes marked ‘compliance’ and ‘demonstrable return on investment’ but it would also be difficult for them to find a customer that doesn’t find this to be a compelling offering.