Hi folks, I wanted to talk backup for a second. Now in large data center environments backup strategies aren’t always cut and dry. You are usually dealing with large amounts of data and very small backup windows.
We’re talking about servers that need to be up 24/7 and 365 days a year and lots of data going through them on a daily basis. Once you get into counting your backup size by terabytes vs gigabytes it’s time to start looking at some different strategies.
VTL has always been a good idea, offloading to disk and then offloading to tape later when you have more time to do it. This way you can offload your backups at high speed in your short window. However an often overlooked method which has started to gain serious traction is deduplication. Many vendors offer it and some even combine it into their VTL offerings. Deduplication can achieve an average compression ratio of 20:1 and at it’s best go as high as 50:1 and even higher sometimes.
So take a moment to look at the deduplication offerings out there. Some of them even offer the ability to replicate the deduped data to an offsite location over the WAN without using tape at all. This way you can save on the cost of tape.
-RP
