The marketing surrounding deduplication would suggest that every customer will win in terms of both ROI and recovery service levels; whilst this may be true of the recovery speeds, it requires a change in environment for the customer to achieve an ROI which may be non-existent should the existing solutions meet the recovery requirements in place. As such education is critical. 

Additional challenges include network availability in more remote locations where a combination of deduplication and effective policy design are important. 

CIOL: Data dedupe adoption levels are still very low in India. Why?

VA: With data dedupe one can achieve granular recovery online for as long as possible and data growth running at between 50-150 per cent CAGR.

However, adoption of deduplication is typically the result of a prior move towards back up or archive to disk.  Most customers in India to whom we've spoken have not upgraded from traditional tape-based systems to disk as the primary storage media for servicing back up or archive. Without this move to disk media deduplication is not deliverable.

Additionally, there are costs associated with both deduplication and the move to disk media. 

CIOL: Do you think that, with the greater penetration of data dedupe technology, tapes will be replaced with disks in India? 

VA: Labour costs mean that manual moving of tapes around is less costly than in the West. However, the ability to restore data quickly from further back (retention times) and the increasing reach of compliance would drive massive data growth in secondary systems, also affecting the Indian market.

Dedupe vendors often focus on the removal of tape but if you can dedupe data to tape without negatively impacting your restore times, then you can make massive savings. Tape libraries use about three per cent of the power that the same space in disk uses, bringing the issue of cost of power into play.

Dedupe also becomes a ‘conveyer belt’ issue; it extends short-term capacity for fast granular restore but at some point that ‘conveyer belt’ runs out and tape has to kick-in again. ‘Re-hydration’ then becomes a problem and all those tapes and drives you thought you could scrap suddenly become valuable again – except exploding the data by up to 20x suddenly becomes a real problem.

CIOL: What will be the trends in the storage market with respect to data deduplication?

VA: Dedupe was needed in hardware because of the initial horsepower required to do it; as soon as software vendors like CommVault worked out how to do it efficiently then hardware vendors were always going to lose out; awareness of data type and purpose gives software vendors a massive efficiently advantage and allows the management to work very effectively.

It also allows for us to re-purpose the technique for many uses – why limit yourself to one type of hardware platform or software niche when you can have dedupe work for you across all of your secondary storage for less money?