In the last few years, deduplication has rapidly become a necessity for even small businesses seeking to enhance their local backup and recovery capabilities. That’s because as thepopularity of using virtualization has grown, so have storage needs accelerated. This is especially true in the age of “big data” where companies are seeking ways to exploit large amounts of information for insights on a daily basis. And with additional storage needs
growing so quickly, costs have increased in proportion to the demand.
Deduplication helps to reduce storage demands in virtual environments by removing redundant data during the backup and recovery process, capturing and storing only unique data elements that have been added or changed since the last backup.
Incorporate global deduplication capability to improve efficiency of backup and recovery
To conserve storage it is important that virtual machine data be deduplicated at a global level. Deduplicating at just a virtual machine or job level still exposes you to writing duplicated data to the backup target, thus increasing storage requirements. Regardless of how backup jobs are organized, they should still be deduplicated across the entire dataset ensuring the backup data houses only unique data.
Source vs. target deduplication
Source deduplication is the removal of redundant blocks before transmission to the backup target. Source deduplication products reduce the bandwidth required to transfer information for backup as well as the amount of storage needed in the backup store. No additional hardware is required to back up to a remote site and many source deduplication products also support automation for offsite copies. Thus source deduplication minimizes the impact of backup and recovery on the network and reduces storage requirements.
Target deduplication by comparison is the removal of data redundancy at the backup target. That means that all data has to be transmitted to a hardware target first, before it can be deduped. While this method will reduce the storage required for backup, it does not reduce the amount of data that must be sent across a LAN or WAN during the backup process. However, many target deduplication solutions are powered by hardware appliances that can deduplicate at very granular levels. Therefore, in some cases, target deduplication can provide better storage savings – at the cost of using additional bandwidth.
Not all target deduplication solutions are the same. Some will deduplicate “in-line” prior to writing data to the disk. Others will perform the deduplication in a “post-process” manner, which leaves data untouched on disk for a period of time and then deduplicates that data as time goes by. Some post-process solutions are smart enough to deduplicate only blocks that are not accessed frequently to improve performance. Therefore, it is often the case that postprocess deduplication will use more storage than in-line deduplication, but with less overhead and faster access for recovery, thereby showing better performance than in-line deduplication solutions.
With this in mind if you are looking for the best de-dupe ratios you can get from a virtual backup product you should try PHD Virtual Backup for free now.
Find out more: http://www.phdvirtual.com/try-buy
