Dell and CommVault Bring Intelligent Plug-n-Scale Deduplication to the Midsize Market

If one didn't know any better, one would think that deduplicating backup data is going to solve all of IT's backup pains. The current train of thought goes something along the lines of "Plug in a deduplicating appliance, point the backup software at the new appliance and, Voila!, the backup problems are solved." The only problem with that viewpoint is that deduplicating appliances alone do not solve equally pressing corporate data management problems and may even create new backup and data management challenges along the way.

The two potential problems that organizations that select a deduplicating disk-based backup appliance may encounter include:

• Inability to scale the solution. As the amount of backup data grows, so do the requirements of the backup appliance, either from a capacity perspective, a performance perspective or both. Once one or the other of these two features on the deduplicating appliance is maxed out, organizations must purchase another appliance - either a secondary one or a larger one.
• Silos of data. The problem of data silos emerges if a company elects to purchase a secondary appliance to complement their existing appliance and then do not migrate their existing deduplicated data to a larger appliance. This is likely what many companies will do for one very simple reason: economics. But when they do so, not only do they have to deduplicate the backup data from scratch again, they now create another repository where their backup data resides.

This does not mean some organizations should avoid deduplicating disk-based backup appliances. As long as it is a small organization with minimal amounts of backup data (under 1 terabyte of data), it will likely not encounter any issues since these are the types of loads these appliances are designed to handle. But if it is a midsize organization that has tens or even hundreds of TBs of data under management that require backup, it needs to take a moment and think about how best to proceed with not just deduplication but data management as well.

Deploying one of these deduplicating disk-based appliances will likely solve the immediate backup pain in a midsize organization. But in 3, 6, 9 or 12 months when the appliance is at capacity or maxed out on throughput, then what? Spending a huge amount of money to upgrade and migrate to a larger appliance is rarely seen as desirable by anyone in this economic climate so introducing a second less expensive appliance becomes the natural choice.

By doing so the organization starts going backwards again in regards to solving its backup problems. Now its IT staff is forced to start balancing the backup jobs between two (or more) appliances as they lose the benefits of deduplication from the first appliance since the second one does not have the deduplication index from the first and two silos of data are created that they need to manage.

So what's the alternative for midsize enterprises to just "throwing" deduplicating appliances at their backp problem? Well, you can still "throw" a deduplicating appliance at the problem, but just throw one at the problem that deduplicates and manages the data in a different manner. That's what today's announcement of the Dell PowerVault DL2000 bundled with the CommVault® Simpana® 8 with block deduplication is designed to solve. Because rather than just deduplicating the data after it is sent to the disk-based target, Simpana deduplicates the backup data before it is stored on the disk target.

The DL2000 offers a number of distinct advantages for midsize organizations.

• First, it means that the DL2000, not a deduplicating backup appliance, manages the deduplication index. Because it manages the index, the DL2000 can store data on any PowerVault system - be it a Dell MD1000 disk array or an ML6000 tape library. So as an MD1000 disk array fills up an organization can leverage Simpana to move deduplicated data from disk to tape while losing none of the deduplication benefits that Simpana provides.
• Second, using Simpana goes to the heart of what organizations should ideally be trying to accomplish. Deduplicating backup data on an appliance solves the immediate backup pain but does little or nothing to solve data management problems that are brewing beneath the surface in every organization. Because the DL2000 delivers a full-featured version of Simpana 8, if organizations want to take advantage of its archiving, content indexing or search capabilities later on, the foundation is in place for them to do so.
• Third, if an organization uses advanced features like archiving on the DL2000, it solves another problem that deduplicating appliances do not - a means to stem the long term growth of data. By archiving aging and stagnant data on the front end, it reduces the amount of data that organizations need to backup which further shortens backup windows and recovery times and reduces the amount of data that the DL2000 needs to manage as part of its deduplicated data store.
• Finally, midsize organizations are also looking to both consolidate and simplify the management of their backup data in remote offices. By deploying DL2000s both locally and remotely, all of their sites gain the benefits of deduplication plus they can use Simpana's replication feature to replicate deduplicated data from remote sites to a central site. Organizations thereby create a standard interface that they can use to manage backups, deduplication, recoveries and replication.

Deduplication is becoming much more than a backup feature - it is becoming an integral component of how backup is done. But organizations should not assume that there is only one way to do deduplication - the DL2000 proves that. So midsize enterprises especially need to look before they leap with deduplication to make sure that in the process of solving today's problems associated with backup and recovery they do not create larger problems tomorrow. The new DL2000 with CommVault Simpana 8 is one way that midsize organizations can avoid this scenario as it delivers deduplication while putting in the foundation to solve the longer term problems that deduplication can potentially create.