Do More for Less

For enterprises worldover and also in India, virtualized environments are the
rage today. Even as CIOs are extolling the virtues of virtualization, there is
a growing realization that virtualized environments also suffer from I/O
bottlenecks as servers can get inundated with I/O requests from multiple virtual
machines.

To ease the I/O operations, most organizations go in for a consolidation
ratio of 8:1 though they can achieve a ratio of 15:1. Hence, while the actual
physical servers are consolidated at the virtual level, data redundancies exist
at the physical storage level. This means increase in storage, processing and
bandwidth requirements when backing up or restoring these virtual images. How
compelling it would have been to have a technology that could have provided such
improved compression ratiosthe answer is de-duplication.

De-duplication vs VTL

In fact, as de-duplication strongly made inroads along with virtualization,
one high profile victim was the Virtual Tape Library (VTL), a technology for
which there are now few takers in India.

According to a report from The 451 Group, a research firm, the de-duplication
market hit the $1 bn mark in 2009. Some of the leading vendors claim that the
market is now standing at a striking $1.2 bn. In the current market downturn,
where companies try to prevent the purchase of more hardware, it comes as no
surprise that they are increasingly looking at de-duplication to leverage their
existing storage infrastructure.

Tech Temperature: 95 (on a scale of 1 to 100)

The Fight to De-Duplicate

In the last few years, EMC as a vendor has pioneered many of the new storage
technologies including virtualization. Therefore, it is no surprise that it
leads the way in de-duplication too; the leadership has come through
acquisitions like Data Domain and Avamar. Data Domain, the erstwhile leader in
de-duplication technologies, caused a bitter bidding battle between EMC and
NetApp last year, though finally the scales tilted in favour of the former.

Subsequently, EMC has debuted the Global Deduplication Array (GDA), a
high-end inline de-duplication storage system based on an extension of the Data
Domain architecture.

EMC also bought Avamar for host based de-duplication. On the backup front,
spreading data de-duplication throughout the infrastructure and closer to the
data source has become more important now along with continuous data protection.

NetApp has 40,000 customers using de-duplication on primary storage globally.
In India, it has 300 customers using its de-duplication technology on primary
storage. That NetApp which has developed its own de-duplication technology but
still wanted Data Domain was an indicator of the growing business importance of
this technology.

The Market for De-Duplication

Data-intensive businesses are increasingly adopting data de-duplication
technology. For example, the telecom, BFSI, manufacturing, etc, are the highest
spenders and also the key drivers for the storage market in general and for
de-duplication in particular. In other words, any sector which functions in a
data-intensive environment would be the target.

While de-duplication definitely seems to be a good bet for many companies,
does everybody go for it? While a few of the vendors think de-duplication is not
for everyone, another set of them claim this technology applies well to all
market verticals. Data-intensive businesses are increasingly adopting data
de-duplication technology.Some vendors like Dell though believe de-duplication
is a feature and not a solution. Dell has a de-duplication strategy for the
high-end market thanks to an alliance with Data Domain. For the mid-range, it
counts on Symantec DD BE 2010 de-duplication and for the low-end of the market
its partner is CommVault.

Rajneesh De

rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in