Primarily, management of email traffic and maintenance of remote office data back up have a high impact on the finances of the company. In addition, much of the data stored on disk is redundant and a large portion of storage devices lay unused. Not only is this a waste of storage, it is a waste of power and floor space - all of which increase IT costs.

“Data explosion is being caused by high adoption of IT, such as CRM, ERP, and trends such as remote office back-up. Moreover, more and more customers are today adopting virtualization,” notes Iyer.

How is virtualization a culprit?
Virtualization is coming in a big way and as per EMC, 65 per cent of companies will be virtualized in another one year.

“Virtualization is throwing up a huge challenge because utilization levels of the server have become very high. This, in turn, throws a huge amount of challenge on the back-up with the shared infrastructure that virtualization provides,” notes Iyer.

“Data deduplication is capable of providing back-up in a virtualized environment. Dedupe improves the efficiency of servers that are being virtualized. Huge amount of value add is provided through dedupe by simplifying and reducing the kind of data that goes through shared network and enabling them to do back-up in a much more efficient manner. This also, in turn, increases bandwidth,” avers Naik.

Benefits of data dedupe
Reducing traffic over the metro results in the increase of bandwidth by over 300 times. The benefits don't end here.

“Data deduplication reduces the data that must be sent across a WAN for remote backups, replication, and disaster recovery. Customers are not only adopting just reduction in storage but an overall reduction in the complexity of environment,” Naik says.

Sunil Chavan, director, content and file services, Hitachi Data Systems, APAC, says that deduplication can revolutionize the way data is stored and protected, if implemented in the right way for an organization’s need.

“Some approaches can result in insufficient data reduction (therefore increasing costs), performance bottlenecks, increased management complexity or islands of deduplication creating unwanted vendor lock-in. The best approach depends on where you are starting from, within or outside the infrastructure, what skills you have in your IT organization and having a realistic expectation on the savings you will get.”

“Deduplication is a strategy or journey that a company can go for,” Iyer signs off.