Deduplication; Understanding Accelerated Deduplication - HP StorageWorks 9000 - Virtual Library System User Manual

6 Deduplication

Deduplication technology represents one of the most significant storage enhancements in recent years,
promising to reshape future data protection and disaster recovery solutions. It allows the user to store
more data in a given amount of space, and restore data at a lower cost, using lower bandwidth links.
Deduplication is the functionality in which only a single copy of a data block is stored on a device.
Duplicate information is removed, thereby reducing the amount of storage used by a given data block.
The HP StorageWorks virtual library system uses Accelerated deduplication.
NOTE:
The deduplication feature is only available on systems running VLS software version 3.0 or higher.
Deduplication offers:
• The ability to store dramatically more disk-based, or online data.
• An increase in the range of Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) available
from further back in time from online backup.
• A reduction of investment in physical tape, and the ability to push physical tape into a deep
archiving mode.
This section describes deduplication including getting deduplication running on your system, configuring
deduplication, and viewing reports.

Understanding Accelerated Deduplication

HP Accelerated deduplication compares the most recent version of a backup to the previous version.
It places pointers in the earlier version that identify duplicated content in the new version. Deduplication
then eliminates the redundant data in the earlier version while retaining the complete, new version.
HP Accelerated deduplication technology is designed around performance and scalability to meet
the needs of enterprise data centers, offering the following features and benefits:
• Leverages object-level differencing code to eliminate software generated data corruption and
safeguard customer data.
• Delivers fastest possible backup performance by using post-processing technology. Accelerated
deduplication occurs after the backup application completes writing to disk, so there is no loss of
bandwidth to the normal backup window.
• Delivers fastest restore by maintaining a complete copy of the most recent backup data. Because
redundant information is removed from previous backups, freeing disk space, data can be stored
on the VLS for longer periods of time. Therefore, older data can be restored faster since it is still
on the VLS
the restore in the traditional manner.
• Provides scalable deduplication performance which can be increased simply by adding additional
nodes. Yet, the multi-node VLS still maintains the manageability of a single device.
there is no need to locate physical media, load it into a tape library, and perform
data can be recovered
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