-- deployment platforms - as software, appliances or virtual appliances,
so customers can roll-out deduplication as their infrastructure
requires it; ending the debate between software versus appliance
deployment of data deduplication
-- deduplication location - either at the source or at the target, so
customers can optimize for network performance and backup speed
-- scope of deduplication - either locally, remotely or globally, so
customers can remove duplicate data from source data pools of various
scopes, permitting maximum compression ratios and minimal network
traffic
"Data deduplication at the source in backup processes is gaining adoption since it can enable greater end-to-end efficiency, such as faster backup. Network bandwidth, the bottleneck in network backup, can be significantly reduced because duplicate data does not traverse the network," said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "According to our research, customers are more concerned with efficiency, citing cost, ease-of-integration and -use, and performance as top factors for selecting data deduplication. The Arkeia-Kadena approach of offering deduplication as an integrated backup solution promises to address all of these top issues."
Source-side Deduplication in Virtualized Environments
Virtual servers are easy to deploy and are not directly constrained by the direct cost of hardware. As a result, virtual environments often suffer from over-provisioning of virtual servers--commonly known as 'virtual server sprawl'. Dedicating an operating system to each application or each test environment causes significant redundant data. As a result, effective data deduplication can result in huge disk capacity reductions and vastly improved backup performance.