Imagine that you are a venture capitalist hearing a pitch
for a new online retail company. You have been captivated by the founders’
enthusiasm and are ready to make an offer, until you hear the proposed shipping
strategy. The plan is to ship the entire store’s inventory to customers every
time they want to make a purchase, so that they can identify what they would
like to purchase in their homes. Would you fund that company?
You don’t have to be seasoned investor to recognize that
this strategy would be unprofitable. It is obvious that sending every item in
an online store’s catalogue to each customer instead of just the specific items
that they desire would be horribly inefficient. The costs would be exorbitant
and the employees involved would be driven mad.
But in the world of data protection, it is common to see
backup administrators relying on a strategy not too different from this
scenario when backing up their data. You see, while standard post-process
deduplication revolutionized data protection by only storing unique data to
disk, there are still even greater efficiencies that can be achieved.
With traditional deduplication technology, all of the data on the server still
needs to be sent over the network every time a backup is run so that unique
data can be identified. Similar to the flawed online retail model, this
inefficient process results in excruciatingly lengthy procedures that will bog
down your network. Backup admins that take advantage of the full power of
EMC’s data protection solutions benefit from deduplication comparable to a
premium online retailer that offers free overnight delivery. With EMC’s
Data Domain Deduplication storage systems along with Data Domain Boost, backup
admins are able to make use of advanced distributed deduplication for an
incredibly efficient backup.
DD Boost enables client-side deduplication, which
distributes parts of the deduplication process up the data path. Specifically,
the backup or application server gains the ability to identify unique data
segments before any data is sent over the network. Adopting
client-side deduplication will enable 50% faster backups, and the relieved
strain on the network will be appreciated as the amount of data transferred is
reduced by up to 99%. This is possible because instead of immediately sending
all of the data over the network and mirroring the flawed retail model, DD
Boost enabled application server only sends unique data (that hasn’t been
backed up yet) to the Data Domain system.
