Let’s travel back in time about fifteen years, when IT shops were making the move from analog to digital and it’s a net new environment for everybody. Corporate execs are telling IT managers to save everything for now, and that they can delete unnecessary data later. So, IT managers turn to back-up. It’s safe, it makes them feel nice and cozy inside. Back-up ensured that multiple copies of data were created. No better way to CYA.
But here was the problem: they weren’t able to know which data would be static and which would be transactional. So they made multiple copies of all data. Little did they know, unstructured data was accounting for the vast majority of the data being backed-up – nearly 80%. The obvious question is: why make multiple copies of something that’s never changing?
Years go by before people realized that something was wrong. See, since then, the characteristics of the data have changed. We are now able to delineate out-of-the-gate whether data is unstructured or transactional. Before, IT organizations had no idea what types of files would be modified over time and which would be unstructured.
The core problem is that the practices of storing data have not changed. IT managers continue to store information as if all environments are net new. They’re backing up everything, instead of just the transactional data.
As time wore on, back-ups were causing data growth to exponentially explode. Industry vendors circled the wounded IT centers, smelling blood and revenue opportunity. After buying lots of hardware and lots of software to manage that hardware, what solution did the industry sharks (vendors) come up with? Data deduplication.
Since everyone was having so many problems with multiple copies of back-ups, they decided to install software that can sort out and extract the duplicates. Hooray! IT managers think the problem is solved, data dedupe companies sprout up like wild weeds, and the storage industry licks their chops in anticipation of a newfound revenue stream.
Now it’s 2010. And what we’ve discovered is that data deduplication is growing. What started as a technology to fix a growing problem has morphed into an entire industry. Back-up companies see data dedupe as a gold mine.
If IT managers continue to “migrate their bad habits” (back-up static data), there will always be room at the table for dedupe. So far this year, six companies – Acronis Inc., Barracuda Networks Inc., CA, CommVault Systems Inc., IBM Corp. and Symantec Corp. – have added dedupe to their back-up software.
Seven10 asks: Why not just fix the problem? Why feed a problem aspirin when what data center managers need is an antidote so that this problem ceases to occur? Seven10 proposes implementing a smart archive today and stop using back-up as an archive. Each method is entirely different. Deduplication offers the same promises as archiving – reduced infrastructure purchases, optimization of current hardware, lower storage costs – but wouldn’t even be necessary if the industry would nip the bad back-up habit in the bud.
Active archiving eliminates duplicate copies and stores information intelligently from Day 1. No headaches, and certainly, no aspirin needed.
