| Studies suggest that organizations that have | | | | backups or primary production data. This article |
| multiple copies of data buy, administer and use | | | | highlights 5 best practices to help you select and |
| two to fifty times the amount of storage space | | | | implement the best data deduplication solution for |
| they'd need with data deduplication. It's no wonder | | | | your environment. |
| than data redundancy is a major contributor to | | | | 1. Consider the broad implications of deduplication. |
| explosive data growth. | | | | You'll want to consider how a deduplication |
| At the outset, data deduplication reduced data | | | | strategy fits within your entire data management |
| redundancy in only specific circumstances, such as | | | | and storage strategy, accounting for tradeoffs in |
| full backups, VMware images and email | | | | things like computational time, accuracy, index |
| attachments. However, duplicate data would still | | | | size, the level of deduplication detected and the |
| persevere. This is mainly because of the | | | | scalability of the solution. |
| multiplication of test and development data across | | | | 2. Learn what data does not dedupe well. Human |
| an organization over time. Backup, archiving, and | | | | created data dedupes differently than data |
| replication create numerous data copies that can | | | | created by computers, so you'll want to consider |
| be found throughout an organization. Add to that | | | | what types of data to avoid deduplication efforts. |
| the fact that users often copy data to locations | | | | 3. Don't obsess over space reduction ratios. The |
| for their own convenience. | | | | length of time that data is retained affects your |
| Organizations are now realizing these facts, and | | | | space reduction ratios, but rather than increasing |
| are seeing data deduplication as a mandatory and | | | | the number of full backups, consider increasing |
| integrated element of their overall IT strategy. | | | | your backup retention period. |
| Essentially there are two methods of reducing the | | | | 4. Don't use multiplexing if you're backing up to a |
| cost of data storage. First, you can use a | | | | VTL. Multiplexing data in a virtual tape library |
| lower-cost storage platform, but that opens | | | | (VTL) wastes computing cycles. |
| numerous additional problems that I won't go into | | | | 5. Pilot multiple systems before you select your |
| here. Second, you can leverage a sound data | | | | system. This will ensure you that the deduplication |
| deduplication strategy designed to reduce required | | | | solution you choose integrates best within your IT |
| storage and data growth. | | | | environment and the data currently in-house. |
| Data deduplication can reduce your data storage | | | | If you'd like to learn more about these 5 data |
| costs by lowering the amount of disk space | | | | deduplication best practices you can visit the |
| required to store data – whether that be data | | | | original blog series. |