The Strategy of Symantec on De-Dupe

Symantec Corp. announced the next phase of its deduplication: strategy to help organizations reduce data, reduce management complexity and reduce infrastructure so they can stop buying storage, recover information faster and improve return on virtualization.

Symantec is moving deduplication closer to information sources by integrating the technology into its information management platforms: NetBackup, Backup Exec and Enterprise Vault, and centrally managing native deduplication as well as third-party deduplication appliances.

Symantec’s strategy
calls for a three-step reduction program:

• Reduce data everywhere by moving deduplication technology closer to information sources
• Reduce deduplication complexity by providing centralized management for all forms of deduplication, both Symantec and partner technologies
• Reduce infrastructure by using deduplication to improve the return on server virtualization by providing storage consolidation, efficient virtual server protection and simplified management

According to a recent study (Stop Buying Storage survey, Applied Research, March 2009), 51 percent of organizations expect to spend more on storage in 2009 even though more than 90 percent have lower budgets and fewer people than in 2008. Today’s deduplication appliances have limited impact since they only address the end of the information management lifecycle. By contrast, Symantec’s Enterprise Vault moves messages, files and SharePoint content directly out of applications like Exchange, SharePoint and Windows file shares to a deduplicated archive – moving deduplication to the information source. Using NetBackup or Backup Exec 2010, organizations will be able to deduplicate backups immediately, at the client, and centrally manage deduplication in the data center and globally across remote offices. As a result, organizations can reduce backup storage by as much as 95 percent while still providing rapid recovery of applications in the event of a disaster.

"Symantec recommends organizations put storage on a diet by deploying deduplication technology to curb data bloat and save costs," said Deepak Mohan, senior vice president, Information Management Group, Symantec. "Protecting more than 50 percent of the world’s data, Symantec is well positioned to deliver deduplication everywhere because our solutions are deployed everywhere the information exists."

Symantec also has a unique approach to reducing backup deduplication complexity by providing a single interface to manage backups using any combination of integrated deduplication software and third-party deduplicated storage through its OpenStorage API. Organizations can deduplicate everywhere while centralizing management to reduce time and cost of operations.

Symantec is delivering on its deduplication strategy
with a multi-phased approach:

• Integrated deduplication is available today in NetBackup and Enterprise Vault, offering deduplicated archiving, deduplicated backup storage and global deduplicated remote office backup.
• NetBackup currently offers integrated, centralized management for third-party deduplicated storage from Data Domain, Quantum, FalconStor and EMC through the OpenStorage API.
• NetBackup PureDisk 6.6, scheduled to be available later this year, will improve storage efficiency by adding enhanced deduplication for backups of virtual server images.
• Backup Exec 2010, scheduled to be available later this year, will integrate deduplication (using NetBackup PureDisk technology) into both backup clients and Backup Exec media server. Backup Exec will also add the OpenStorage API to manage third-party deduplication appliances.
• NetBackup 7, scheduled to be available in 2010, will integrate deduplication into the backup client and NetBackup media server.

"We recently deployed NetBackup PureDisk to simplify the deduplication across both our physical and virtual servers and have already seen tremendous return on investment," said Al Schipani, manager of server engineering, Westchester Medical Center. "PureDisk allows us to back up 90 percent less virtual machine data, eliminate 80 percent of tape costs and keep two months worth of backup data on hand for quick restore from disk. We further reduced costs since PureDisk was able to backup to our existing storage systems without having to buy a virtual tape library – this is a huge benefit and one of the reasons we selected Symantec over other deduplication vendors on the market."

"Data deduplication is a popular form of data reduction that is generating interest among IT decision makers," according to the Gartner report (Use Data Deduplication to Improve Availability and Lower Cost, May 27, 2009) authored by Stanley Zaffos and Dave Russell. "Where applicable, data deduplication results in disk capacity reductions anywhere from one-third to 1/25 of the original physical disk requirement; it also offers secondary cost savings in power and cooling, network bandwidth usage reduction and, potentially, software licensing costs."