Data growth remains one of the top pain points for backup admins. The legacy data protection technologies are not keeping up with the data growth. To address this problem, many organizations are re-architecting their backups. One of the key elements of backup redesign continues to be data deduplication.
Target based dedupe solutions were the early entrants in the dedupe market and a large number of users adopted these technologies over the years. While the target based dedupe solutions do a great job of reducing the data, they do so at the end of the backup cycle. The data essentially travels in a fully hydrated format (non-dedupe) from the clients, through the media server, to the target device where it finally gets reduced. You get great dedupe rates, which solves one problem—storage costs. But wait, how is this solving the backup window problem? Data will continue to grow and if you don’t address the backup volume problem (the sheer volume of data being backed up and sent through the infrastructure), someday you will not be able to meet your backup window with the above approach.
Consider this simple example of protecting 100 TBs of data for a year
100 TB protected over 52 weeks
52 weekly full backups = 5,200TB
6x52 daily incremental backups (5%) = 1,560 TB
Total = 6,760 TB of Total Backup Volume à This is the volume (67.6 X Source Data Size) of data that is moving through your environment through the year to protect the 100 TBs of source data.
What are you doing to reduce your backup volume problem?
Symantec announced the availability of source side dedupe in NetBackup version 7 which deduplicates data at the source and only sends the unique blocks of data to the storage media. But have you heard of the NetBackup Accelerator functionality that was introduced in NetBackup version 7.5? Many people ask what is the difference between NetBackup Source Side dedupe and NetBackup Accelerator. Simply put, NetBackup Accelerator puts NBU Client Side dedupe on steroids. You get lightning fast backups. Not only do you solve the storage problem, but also solve the more fundamental problem that most people tend to overlook—the backup volume.
Find out more about how you can shatter your backup window with NetBackup Accelerator at: http://www.betterbackupforall.com/video.php?video=0
