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Symantec note that “As companies integrate disk and discover its benefits as a more active component of their back up environments, they soon realize that they cannot keep all of their backup data on disk. Despite declines in the cost of disk storage, they still lack the available capacity to recover most data from disk locally in the data centre. Data de duplication is a disk-based technology that enables companies to eliminate duplicate backup data and significantly decrease the storage, and in some cases bandwidth, consumption.”

Data volumes in all organisations continue to grow relentlessly. Estimates vary between 50 – 70% a year.

Whichever way you look at it the growth rate is staggering and protecting this data, the core information that businesses rely on for growth, is a critical issue for both the IT industry and the customers whose needs it serves. It doesn’t help that these issues have to be addressed in the face of stiff budgetary constraints.

I was chatting to a potential customer the other day, looking at the pros and cons of de-duplication methods and it’s clear to me that most people still view de-duplication with a bit of trepidation.

While the mechanics of de-duplication are complex, it’s important to understand that de-duplication should be considered as just another process running on the storage system. We trust the storage system to write the data to disk as ones or zeros, that’s rocket science, so surely we can trust the system to get the de-duplication right.