BANGALORE, INDIA: De-duplication Everywhere strategy and recent releases, NetBackup 7 and Backup Exec 2010, seem to suggest that Symantec is now focusing more on storage sectors, especially data de-duplication.

Also Read: Data Dedupe: More, but Less

“In July 2009, Symantec announced its de-duplication strategy, which is designed to reduce data everywhere, reduce de-duplication complexity, and reduce data infrastructure. Symantec is delivering on this strategy with the latest releases by adding deduplication ‘everywhere’ to the back-up client, closer to the data source, as well as in the media server that manages the back end storage,” says Vijay Mhaskar, Vice President, Information Management Group, Symantec, in an interview with CIOL. Excerpts:

CIOL: How apt will be Symantec's 'Deduplication Everywhere' strategy in the current storage scenario?

Vijay Mhaskar: There is a tremendous amount of growth in unstructured data, which is giving rise to storage growth in India.

According to a report released by IDC in October 2009, unstructured data in traditional data centres will eclipse the growth of transaction-based data that has been recently the bulk of enterprise data processing.

A recent report from IDC states that transactional data projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21.8 percent, while unstructured data by 61.7 percent CAGR in data centres. Another report from IDC suggests that critical data is growing at a rate of 52 percent per year!

Symantec believes that organizations need to put their data storage on a diet, using a three-step reduction programme:

Reduce data everywhere by moving de-duplication technology closer to information sources.

Reduce de-duplication complexity by providing centralized management for all forms of de-duplication.

Reduce infrastructure by using de-duplication to improve the return on server virtualization by providing storage consolidation, efficient virtual server protection and simplified management.

CIOL: Now that you have also joined the likes of CommVault, IBM, Data Domain, Avamar, Quantum, what would be your future plans?

VM: According to the 2010 State Of The Data Center report commissioned by Symantec, 62 percent of survey respondents consisting of all size enterprises said deduplication should be both built-in to back-up software and implemented in deduplication appliances.

Data de-duplication offers enterprises the opportunity to dramatically reduce the amount of storage required for back-ups and to more efficiently centralize backup data to multiple sites for assured disaster recovery.

Symantec’s prescription for Information is to protect completely , de-duplicate everywhere, delete information with confidence and discover efficiently.

CIOL: How much time does Symantec's applications take to de-dupe data? How is it different from other products in the market?

VM: The vast majority of vendors today offer de-duplication as the very last step in data management.  Today’s de-duplication appliances have limited impact since they only address the end of the information management lifecycle.

With our de-duplication strategy, Symantec is providing organizations with greater flexibility than our competitors. By providing an interface between sophisticated back-up and recovery software and advanced disk-based storage appliances, Symantec has obviated the need to choose between de-dupe approaches. Organizations can now leverage an integrated platform that not only supports both software- and hardware-based de-dupe but is also easy to manage.

· Client-side de-duplication results in faster back-ups, up to 90 percent less network usage, and of course, less storage consumption. 

· Back-up Server:  No Client Impact,  Scales Efficiently,  Easy Configuration,  Up to 70 percent Less Than Appliances.

· Storage Appliance / OpenStorage:  Simplify Management, Improve Infrastructure, Better Performance.