IBM ProtecTIER Deduplication Enhanced For Disaster Recovery: Page 2 of 2

Deduplication does offer a number of advantages, such as reduced bandwidth requirements and more efficient use of the available bandwidth. WAN optimization products such as Silver-Peak's NX appliances can reduce the WAN bandwidth required to replicate data to a remote site. The company works closely with storage vendors such as EMC to ensure seamless integration with storage products, but the data written to disk or tape is not deduplicated. However, it's also true that disks or tape are relatively cheap and adding physical capacity may be more cost effective and more network efficient than paying per TB licensing fee for ProtecTIER's depuplication.

The decision to follow WAN optimization or deduplicated replication is not a clear one. You have to factor in the cost and benefit of WAN optimization alone versus ProtecTIER's deduplicated replication. WAN optimization reduces WAN bandwidth requirements--providing the data is compressible--but then add in the cost for media to store and manage the original data. Compare that to the the increasing licensing cost--licensing is based on capacity--for ProtecTIER 's deduplication minus the savings of not having to purchase more physical media. Your mileage may vary.