For today’s time-strapped, resource-limited small businesses, the prospect of having to write backup data to magnetic tape each night and deliver it off-site for secure storage is daunting, to say the least. But while factors ranging from hackers to hurricanes make strict backup policies a business necessity, a relatively new technology is helping to ease the burden.

Although best known for slashing storage costs, data de-duplication technology is making a name for itself as a key component of any disaster recovery strategy. Traditional backup systems store countless copies of the same information again and again — bytes and blocks of data that greatly accumulate throughout the course of a business day.

Data de-duplication, on the other hand, works by only storing the changes that have been made to that data. Instead, redundant data is replaced with pointers indicating unique copies. By carefully eliminating redundant data, data de-duplication essentially reduces the volume of backup data — and bandwidth — required for transmitting large amounts of information to a recovery system. The result is a technology that not only allows for increased storage capacity with fewer hard drives and longer data retention periods but faster recovery times in the event of a disaster.

Greater simplicity — and space

That’s a huge relief to many small businesses. “For smaller companies that don’t have a lot of IT resources to handle data recovery, they want to make the backup process as simple as possible,” says Lauren Whitehouse, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group ^[1], of Milford, Mass. “Reducing their dependence on things like tape media and tape devices helps bring more simplicity to the IT environment.”

But that’s not all. “Data de-duplication squishes the data down so much that you recapture disk space that you didn’t have before. So instead of backing up once a day, you can back up four times a day,” says Whitehouse. In practical terms, if a network outage occurs at 4 p.m. on a busy Wednesday afternoon, an IT manager need only retrieve data stored between the hours of 1 p.m. and 4 p.m., for example, rather than the past 24 hours, as is often the case when a company is working with limited storage capacity and/or tape media.

No wonder then that data de-duplication is fast catching on. According to a survey by The 451 Group ^[2], while only 23 percent of IT organizations are using data de-duplication in their backup and data protection infrastructure, 28 percent of non-adopters said they plan to use it within six months, and another 23 percent said they would adopt it within a year.

Caveat emptor

However, there is some controversy surrounding data de-duplication’s powers of recovery. “The downside of storing more data on a given disk drive is it might actually take you longer to do backup and recovery,” warns Greg Schulz, founder of StorageIO Group ^[3], a Stillwater, Minn-based consulting firm. “That’s because de-duplication looks at the data as its being ingested into a storage system and has to do some heavy thinking. That’s a time constraint so if you need to restore, recover, and repopulate that data very quickly, performance can be a concern.”

Of course, lightening fast data recovery for one company may seem painstakingly slow to another. It’s all the more reason, says Schulz, for companies to carefully consider their unique disaster recovery needs when turning to data de-duplication for protection.