Posted by Howard Marks
February 10, 2011
Given the fact that almost half the computers in corporate America are laptops, and a significant amount of data is created on those portable devices, I am constantly amazed at how frequently organizations leave the data on those laptops essentially unprotected. By taking a unique application aware approach to data deduplication, Druva's Insync may be the best solution to date to this seemingly intractable problem.
When I talk to corporate IT managers about backing up data on laptops; I as often as not get resistance to the very concept. Users, they say, should be responsible for backing up that data, after all it is their data. Unfortunately we all know what the result is when you try and make users responsible for backing up their own data, some users will get incredibly compulsive about the process and backup everything, including 47 copies of the latest Justin Bieber video, but most will continue in blissful ignorance of the process until something goes wrong.
When something goes wrong it will of course be corporate IT's problem and corporate IT will not only spend thousands of dollars for data recovery at OnTrack, but the company will end up spending even more if limited recovery fails and the user has to spend their time doing the work over or even worse the order gets lost.
It's not like there haven't been tools for backing up laptops. Way back in the 20th century I was writing whitepapers about Seagate Software's Client Exec and several generations of products have come and gone in the meantime. While some of these products, including Client Exec, did do single instance storage at some level, they still took a huge amount of bandwidth to backup the poor road warriors laptop.
Source-based deduplication in products like Symantec's PureDisk or Avamar addresses the bandwidth problem by not only eliminating duplicate data from a single laptop but also by duplicating across the set of machines being backed up to a single repository. Druva's application aware deduplication promises to be even more bandwidth, and storage efficient.
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