Data de-dupe to take India by storm

BANGALORE, INDIA: The world maybe shrinking but its information lot is expanding for sure.

Do you know that in 2008 alone, world-over 487 billion gigabytes of information was created and this data will double in every 18 months! It doesn't stop here, by 2012, digital information produced will increase by five times. (IDC's study, ‘Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands’)

This is definitely not going to sound good to CIOs, who are supposed to make room for extra storage devices in the midst of the shrunken IT budgets. Especially, when their mantra 'Do more with less' has changed to 'Do much more with less'!

Ever thought, each one of us out there is lending a hand to this exploding data? Every second we spend time in building networks over social network sites, forward/send e-mails, or SMS, we are adding to this information lot. We would have given it a thought, if only we knew that in the next four years, interactions between people via email, messaging, social networks, etc. - will grow by a factor of 8.0. (IDC)

The list doesn’t end here. According to IDC, mobile users will grow by a factor of 3.0 and over the next four years, 600 million more people will become Internet users. Moreover, nearly two-thirds of all Internet users will use mobile devices, at least some of the time. Non-traditional IT devices such as wireless meters, automobile navigation systems, industrial machines, RFID readers, and intelligent sensor controllers - will grow by a factor of 3.6.

Most of the world's economic stimulus efforts will also increase the amount of digital information created, the result of increased access to broadband communications, electronic patient records, smart electric grids, smart buildings and autos, etc. Moreover, by 2012, Internet commerce will be a $13 trillion industry, mostly involving sensitive business-to-business commerce.

Data Explosion: An Indian perspective

Coming to the third largest economy in APAC and second fastest growing one in the world, India stands no different.

Simon Gregory, business development director, CommVault, says: “Indian companies are growing at a rapid pace today, and so is growing their data volume."

Enterprise IT adoption is a major cause for data explosion. IT applications, i.e. ERP, CRM, etc (43 percent) followed by emails/attachments (19 percent) are the major sources of data growth in enterprises. ('Data Explosion in India - Trends & Challenges', a survey by The Nielsen Company in association with NetApp)

“The increasing data is in turn increasing the operational expenses of a company,” Gregory adds.

Moreover, the financial impact is tremendous on these organisations, the NetApp study states further. Primarily, management of email traffic and maintenance of remote office data back-up have a high impact on 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.

Thus, data is expanding in an unprecedented rate and so is the need to store it; cost effectively.

Venkatesh Iyer, head- India & SAARC, Backup, Recovery and Archival Solutions, EMC, says: “There is a huge explosion of data happening and it is becoming much more complex in terms of managing it in the traditional form of back-up.”

“People are looking at additional means of storing and managing data, especially from a single point, for the reason of easy recovery, search, access and retention,” adds Gregory.

Enters Data Deduplication or dedupe

Data deduplication is a process of removing redundant data from the environment.

"Going forward data de-duplication is going to hit the Indian market," notes Gregory.

Iyer also agrees and adds that data dedupe is really catching up in a big way in India and large scale adoption are seen amongst high-end SMB customers and enterprises, especially in IT/ITeS, telecom, healthcare and BFSI.

“Data dedupe increases availability of network bandwidth for other applications and hence reduces the need for additional back-up storage by almost 300 percent. The savings in network bandwidth and back-up storage are the biggest driving factors for this technology,” Iyer notes.

“A phenomena very specific to India is that when a company grows, they outgrow the smaller storage softwares deployed. We at CommVault look at managing data differently. Unlike other vendors, who deploy separate software solutions depending on the function of data management for back-up, archive, replication etc, we have a consolidated storage and service architecture; a single interface management system. Thus managing, reporting and recovering data from a single point,” Gregory avers.

“EMC has end-to-end dedupe strategy, from source to target. Whereas, most other vendors in the market have point products, either at target or source level,” Iyer avers.

However, there's no one-size fits all approach, cautions Iyer. Organizations have to assess their needs and decide between the source and target approaches or a combination of the two which is advisable in most cases.

Commvault has set its eyes on Indian data deduplication space and so has EMC.

There is no stop for this growing heap of data, but storing it away smartly will be the way to go.