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Rethinking De-Dupe Strategy in Software-Defined Data Center With Quest QoreStor

By Jerome Wendt, DCIG

This article was written by Jerome M. Wendt, president and lead analyst of DCIG, Inc., an independent storage analyst and consulting firm.

Rethinking Your Data Deduplication Strategy
in the Software-Defined Data Center

As companies begin their journey toward the software-defined data center of tomorrow, each component of their data center comes under scrutiny to determine its fit in this new world. While many layers of the data center already have software-defined offerings, data deduplication targets remain hardware centric. These solutions must evolve to become software centric to co-exist both on-premises and in the cloud. As this evolution occurs, companies will find that software-de ned storage (SDS) deduplication target solutions such as Quest QoreStor will drive cost out of their environment even as they give companies more flexibility and lower their overall data center costs.

Data Centers Going Software-Defined
There is little dispute tomorrow’s data center will become software-defined for reasons no one entirely anticipated even as recently as a few years ago. While companies have long understood the benefits of virtualizing the infrastructure of their data centers, the complexities and costs of integrating and managing data center hardware far exceeded whatever benefits that virtualization delivered. Now thanks to technologies such as the IoT, machine intelligence, and analytics, among others, companies may pursue software-defined strategies more aggressively.

The introduction of technologies that can monitor, report on, analyze, and increasingly manage and optimize data center hardware frees organizations from performing housekeeping tasks such as:
• Verifying hardware firmware compatibility with applications and OSs
• Troubleshooting hot spots in the infrastructure
• Identifying and repairing failing hardware components

Automating these tasks does more than change how organizations manage their data center infrastructures. It reshapes how they can think about their entire IT strategy. Rather than adapting their business to match the limitations of the hardware they choose, they can now pursue business objectives where they expect their IT hardware infrastructure to support these business initiatives.

This change in perspective has already led to the availability of software-defined compute, networking, and storage solutions. Further, software-defined applications such as databases, firewalls, and other applications that organizations commonly deploy have also emerged. These virtual appliances enable companies to quickly deploy entire application stacks. While it is premature to say that organizations can immediately virtualize their entire data center infrastructure, the foundation exists for them to do so.

As they do, data protection software, like any other application, needs to be part of this software-defined conversation. In this regard, backup software finds itself well-positioned to capitalize on this trend. It can be installed on either physical or VMs and already ships from many providers as a virtual appliance. But storage software that functions primarily as a deduplication storage target already finds itself being boxed out of the broader software-defined conversation.

Software-Defined Storage Deduplication
Targets Boxed Out of the Software-Defined World

Software-defined storage (SDS) deduplication targets exist that have significantly increased in storage capabilities. By the end of 2018, a few of these software-defined virtual appliances scaled to support about 100TB or more of capacity. But organizations must exercise caution when looking to position these available solutions as a cornerstone in a broader software-defined deduplication storage target strategy.

This caution, in many cases, stems less from the technology itself and more from the vendors who provide these SDS deduplication target solutions. In every case, save one, these solutions originate with providers who focus on selling hardware solutions. To then use their SDS deduplication target solutions, companies will typically find the following to be true:
1. They must acquire that vendor’s physical deduplication target appliance to obtain the full breadth of software functionality that the virtual appliance offers. This creates a dependency to introduce a physical appliance into a company’s data center either initially or at some point in the future.
2. The software only runs on that vendor’s hardware. This requires that companies buy hardware from that vendor which undermines one of the driving forces for adopting a software-defined strategy: Eliminating the requirement to purchase hardware from a specific vendor to cost-effectively attain their business objectives.

These two concerns exemplify why companies must carefully choose the best course of action for them to pursue when it comes to selecting an SDS deduplication target.

Seven Prerequisites That SDS Deduplication Target Must Satisfy
To ensure an SDS deduplication target solution aligns with broader corporate objectives to become a software-defined data center, here are seven prerequisites that the solution should satisfy:
1. Enterprise scale. Enterprises will have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of terabytes of data to protect. The SDS deduplication target must minimally scale to protect hundreds of terabytes and have a roadmap to protect petabytes of data in the not-too-distant future.
2. Software decoupled from underlying hardware. Hardware providers that offer SDS deduplication targets are not always forth coming about the hardware configurations required to run their software. Often, their software is tuned for their software and vice versa. A provider of SDS deduplication target should be forthcoming about its hardware requirements so it can work with hardware from any provider.
3. Offers a deduplication software agent. Some data is best deduplicated on the physical or VM client or on the backup software server. With a SDS deduplication technology providing a deduplication software agent that runs on any client or works with any backup software, it can reduce the amount of data sent over the network. This agent should be low or no-cost and deploy easily requiring minimal or no changes to the applications, backup software, databases or the OS.
4. Works with largest general purpose cloud service providers. Nearly every enterprise has plans to leverage general purpose cloud service providers as part of their broader software-defined strategy. The two largest general purpose cloud service providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, factor into many of their plans. These providers both offer multiple tiers of compute and storage resources that can host the SDS deduplication target to optimize the initial deployment as well as its ongoing operations.
5. Replication. Central to any viable data protection strategy is moving data off-site, whether to another data center or the cloud. This requires that product offer robust data replication features that can efficiently and cost-effectively move data.
6. Seamless, cost-effective scaling. Acquiring too much capacity when companies first buy a physical appliance and then running out of capacity before the appliance is fully depreciated are two common drawbacks of a hardware approach. This requires that companies either add new physical appliances into their environment or replace existing ones which both require more capital. Using an SDS solution, companies mitigate the need to overpay at the beginning, they only pay for the capacity they consume, and then they can incrementally add more capacity as needed. Further, the SDS instance can seamlessly move to new hardware at any time to match the changing demands of the backup requirement.
7. Vendor neutral. Most SDS deduplication targets originate with vendors that predominantly sell hardware. This results in alliances and preferences as to what hardware on which their software works and how well it works with them. While SDS solutions should certainly offer reference architectures and have preferred partners, companies should be free to deploy the SDS solution on the hardware platform of their choice.

Realizing the Promise of Tomorrow’s Data Center
Requires a Viable SDS Deduplication Target Offering Today

Companies are putting plans in place right now to build the data center of tomorrow. That data center will be a largely software-defined data center with solutions that span both on-premises and cloud environments. To achieve that end, companies need to select solutions that have a software-designed focus which meet their current needs while positioning them for tomorrow’s requirements.

Most layers in the data center stack, to include compute, networking, storage, and even applications, are already well down the road of transforming from hardware-centric to software-centric offerings. Yet in the face of this momentous shift in corporate data center environments, SDS deduplication target solutions have been slow to adapt.

It is this gap that SDS deduplication products such as Quest QoreStor look to fill. Coming from a company with ‘software’ in its name, Quest comes without the hardware baggage that other SDS providers must balance. More importantly, Quest QoreStor offers a feature-rich set of services that range from deduplication to replication to support for all major cloud, hardware, and backup software platforms that comes from 10 years of experience in delivering deduplication software.

Free to focus solely on delivering a SDS solution, Quest QoreStor represents the type of SDS deduplication target that does truly meet the needs of today’s enterprise while positioning them to realize the promise of tomorrow’s software-defined data center.

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