Deduplication; Introduction; Hp Deduplication Solutions - HP 12000 Design Manual

Deduplication

Introduction

In recent years, the amount of data that companies produce has been steadily increasing. To
comply with government regulations, or simply for disaster recovery and archival purposes,
companies must retain more and more data. Consequently, the costs associated with data storage
– labor, power, cooling, floor space, transportation of physical media – have all risen. Virtual tape
libraries have become a cornerstone in modern data protection strategy due to their many benefits;
chief among these is cost. The list of virtual tape benefits also includes seamless integration into
existing backup solutions, improved SAN backup performance, and faster single file restores than
those performed with physical tape.
Deduplication, one of the most significant storage enhancements in recent years, promises to
reshape future data protection and disaster recovery solutions. This technology is ideal for virtual
tape libraries. Deduplication technology references blocks of data that have been previously stored,
and only stores new backup data that is unique. Data that is not unique is replaced with a pointer
to the location of the original data. Because there is often a great deal of duplicate data present
from one backup session to the next, disk space is consumed by similar or identical iterations of
data. Deduplication greatly improves storage efficiency by only storing an instance of data once,
while still allowing backup streams to be restored as if they had been retained in their entirety.
See Figure 4 (page
Figure 4 Unique Backup Data
Item Description
1 Data from the first backup stream is stored to disk.
2 Duplicate data (in blue) as well as unique data (in red) in a second backup stream is identified.
3 Duplicate data in the second backup stream is eliminated.
4 Unique data in the second backup stream is stored to disk.

HP Deduplication Solutions

HP offers two deduplication technologies: HP Accelerated deduplication, a licensed feature available
with HP Virtual Library Systems (VLS), and HP Dynamic deduplication, an integrated feature with
HP D2D Backup System. Both HP deduplication solutions offer the following benefits:
Longer retention of data.
Faster, less expensive recoveries and improved service levels.
Fewer resources consumed, reducing operational costs.
Completely transparent to host.
No data is lost – backup streams can be fully restored.
Block or chunk level deduplication, providing greater reduction of data.
Even greater reduction of data when combined with traditional data compression.
14 Concepts
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