By Dave Raffo, Senior News Director
Now that data deduplication is rapidly becoming a mainstream feature in data backup and recovery, a big question for any data dedupe
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product is, "Does it do global
deduplication?"
Global deduplication reduces backup data across multiple devices and sites, so the devices act as one large system. The alternative is local dedupe, which reduces data on each device individually. Global deduplication becomes more important to your data storage environment when you have more data to back up and use more devices because it can often improve deduplication ratios. However, one of the biggest benefits of global dedupe is the ability to efficiently manage multiple devices. For instance, global dedupe allows load balancing and high availability.
The major data backup software applications with dedupe today offer global deduplication. These include Asigra Inc. Cloud Backup, EMC Corp.'s Avamar, CommVault Simpana and Symantec Corp. PureDisk.
Exagrid Systems EX Series, Falconstor’s File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) and Virtual Tape Library, Hewlett Packard (HP) Co.'s Virtual Library System (VLS), IBM Corp. ProtecTier, NEC HydraStor and Sepaton DeltaStor support global dedupe on virtual tape libraries and disk targets.
Some of the large deduplication vendors still only support local deduplication, including market leader EMC's Data Domain and Quantum Corp.'s DXi Series. Local dedupe devices each use their own repository, which limits the deduplication ratio when shifting a backup job to a different appliance. This means a 16-controller Data Domain array, for instance, acts as 16 separate systems. Data Domain execs argue that their systems are large enough and fast enough that global dedupe isn't necessary, although Data Domain also plans to include global dedupe for two nodes in its next product release this year.
Independent backup expert W. Curtis Preston suggests that organizations backing up more than 50 TB of data a night should use global dedupe. Also, those with smaller but rapidly growing backups should also consider it.
Editor's Tip: Learn
more about global
data deduplication in this article.Click here to go to part two of data deduplication tutorial, and learn about choosing data deduplication products.
This was first published in March 2010
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