FalconStor Blog
Data Deduplication (7)
Let’s call it what it is: data deduplication is the waste management system of the storage industry, and just as with any other waste management process, you really need your system to be very efficient. But to start, and just as with any other pandemic, let’s take a look at the symptoms of data duplication! The biggest duplicate producer in today’s IT world is the traditional backup process. Yes, I’m talking about the antiquated, passé, and totally broken batch backup process that produces more data than you can ever get any use for and way less than what you’d really need.
Over the past 18 months, the data protection industry has made significant advancements in deduplication, specifically in terms of performance improvement, scalability, business continuity, mixed environments, and end-to-end solutions. At FalconStor, we’ve been busy leading these efforts, specifically by building on the foundation of our industry-leading FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL) and its companion, FalconStor File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) to fuel our mission to deliver fast, efficient global deduplication for both block and file data. And we have succeeded with the availability of version 7 (v7) of the FalconStor data protection suite.
Our deduplication advancements over the past year and a half have come together to deliver FalconStor deduplication v7, leading the industry with an integrated solution that makes no change to a customer’s infrastructure, operations, or data protection solutions, yet leads the pace of the industry in:
With data growing at unprecedented rates and IT budgets stuck at pre-2008 levels, deduplication is growing in popularity for companies of all sizes. IT Pro recently reviewed the FalconStor FDS entry target appliance, the SA101 and found it has the right stuff “…performed exceptionally well in our lab tests showing it was capable of providing higher backup speeds and better deduplication ratios than much of the competition at this level of the market.”
On the "What's hot/What's not" list for the future, data deduplication holds the top spot, as it has for the last four IDC surveys, with 76 percent of respondents already implementing it, planning to or actively evaluating the technology. The second half of 2010 continues to be ripe for increased use of deduplication. The reasons are simple: data needs are increasing, storage is still expensive and businesses cannot afford to continue over-provisioning and adding capacity – especially when dedupe will enable those organizations to do more with what they already have.
Almost as difficult as explaining when to use affect versus effect in a sentence, I spend a lot of time explaining why it is difficult to accurately size a deduplication solution for a specific customer's environment. The simple answer is, "the deduplication ratio will depend on your data and backup methods."
