Quest SmartDiff Technology Compresses SQL Server Backups

Quest Software, Inc. unveiled SmartDiff, a patent-pending technology built into the latest version of its market-leading backup and recovery solution, LiteSpeed for SQL Server. With SmartDiff, LiteSpeed for SQL Server’s compression ratio jumps from 20:1 up to 40:1, providing powerful SQL backup compression that is comparable to storing more than a terabyte of data on a single USB thumb drive. The result is a unique backup and recovery approach, unmatched in flexibility, that greatly reduces backup times, creates a significantly smaller storage footprint, and maintains a high level of recoverability.

"I’ve relied on LiteSpeed for six years to achieve what I already considered substantial time and disk savings for backup and recovery," said Thomas LaRock, database administrator at a financial services company. "I’m excited that Quest has introduced new technology that takes this to a whole new level, and continues to add even more value to a tool that helps me do my job more efficiently and instantly saves my organization money."

Current backup and recovery best practices involve conducting full database backups every night in preparation for disaster recovery scenarios. Because only a small percentage of an organization’s data changes on a daily basis, full database backups are inefficient, while incremental backups require more time and resources than necessary. SmartDiff reduces backup size so substantially that backup times can literally go from hours to minutes, while providing huge storage savings.

"With SmartDiff, Quest brings deduplication technology to SQL Server, continuing the kind of ground-breaking innovation that LiteSpeed has delivered since its inception," said Billy Bosworth, vice president and general manager of the SQL Server business unit, Quest Software. "SmartDiff provides the amazing levels of storage savings customers need, while also dramatically decreasing backup times – a benefit that often is just as valuable."