ABSTRACT
Deduplication is a logical extension of two existing technologies—single-instance storage (used quite successfully in systems such as archival products and many mail servers in order to reduce storage requirements) and traditional file/data compression technology. In fact, deduplication can even sometimes be described as “global compression.” Deduplication achieves considerably more optimized storage savings by considering incoming data against previously compressed data;* hence “global compression” is an appropriate description. Post-processing deduplication works quite differently to inline processing. For post-processing, the storage is effectively broken into two discrete segments: a landing/staging area, and a deduplication area. Deduplication neatly solves (for many businesses and data types) one of the biggest core problems with backup and recovery—handling explosive data growth and retention requirements. Deduplication systems that tightly integrate with backup products for generating registered backup copies can represent a considerable time saving. Consider the replication of deduplicated backups. This similarly plays a role in backup and recovery use of the technology.
