Data De-duplication During Backups Promotes Green Computing

Utilization of Data Reduction Technology Across Remote Office Sites Reduces Data Management Load, Decreases Energy Consumption, and Increases Network Performance

Asigra Inc., the technology leader in agentless backup and recovery software for enterprises and service providers targeting the growing managed storage services market, today announced additional benefits of data de-duplication technologies for large distributed enterprises. Already lauded by analysts for its ability to reduce hardware costs by reducing the amount of data center storage that needs to be managed, data de-duplication provides additional benefits when deployed across multiple remote sites in distributed office environments including the reduction in power required for disk-based backup storage repositories.

In the computing industry, data de-duplication refers to the elimination of redundant data. In the de-duplication process, duplicate data is deleted, leaving only one copy of the data to be stored regardless of how many or where the multiple copies reside. However, indexing of all data is still retained should that data ever be required. De-duplication is able to reduce the required storage capacity and traffic load since only the unique data is stored. Applied to tens or hundreds of remote office sites, savings in storage capacity and reductions in remotely transferred data is greatly amplified.

The challenges presented by rapid data growth especially at remote and branch offices, including growing storage hardware requirements, increasing power consumption, LAN/WAN bottlenecking, and decreased or slow data access, are key issues for many organizations seeking less costly and more efficient methods of dealing with constantly expanding volumes of information. Additionally, in an atmosphere ripe with concerns over global warming, organizations are making energy reduction part of their mission to reduce the energy footprint of their organization. Addressing these challenges while handling a growing amount of data that needs to be properly stored and managed requires a new approach — data de-duplication.

When deployed, data de-duplication technology rapidly decreases both data storage costs and energy usage. When applied to remote site backup, it also increases network and backup performance; in fact, according to analysts, eliminating the transfer of duplicate information can reduce traffic over the WAN and on local and remote backup servers by as much as 400 percent with a corresponding savings in backup energy requirements. The result is faster and more reliable data recovery, with reduced energy usage that is likely to make environmentalists proud.

“De-duplication is absolutely a necessity given the amount of data that organizations create every day,” said Marc Staimer, founding analyst with Dragonslayer Consulting. “Not offering de-duplication is like driving a Hummer in quicksand — it just requires too much energy for the resulting performance.”


"By reducing your data footprint, you subsequently lessen the burden on your entire IT infrastructure, especially during peak periods of use," said Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst with the IT infrastructure analyst and consulting firm StorageIO. "When it comes to reducing your data footprint for remote office branch office (ROBO) environments, the benefits are faster backup and recovery as well as enabling more comprehensive data protection while maximizing your existing infrastructure."

Asigra Televaulting
Combining powerful data de-duplication and other data reduction features, Televaulting, Asigra’s agentless, disk-based, WAN-optimized, multi-site backup/recovery software, delivers high-performance and highly efficient backup and recovery. As it backs up data at remote sites, the Televaulting data de-duplication feature, included with the product at no additional charge, works at both the block and file level and transfers the single-instanced data to a central storage vault – typically located at the data center. Asigra’s data de-duplication technology includes global single-instance storage across all sites; for example, only one copy of a Microsoft Office application would be transmitted and stored in the event application recovery is required, regardless of the number of copies of that application deployed across the enterprise. With Televaulting data de-duplication, only the changed parts of files are transmitted after the first backup and all data is compressed prior to transmission. In addition to working on multiple backups of the same file in the same location with multiple backups, Televaulting also de-duplicates instances of same data in multiple locations. De-duplication has no adverse effect on restoration times.

“The continuing deluge in information growth demands a next-generation backup and recovery platform that can scale up as required. Although we view data de-duplication as a necessity for remote office data protection, the peripheral benefits are impressive,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. “Whether used directly by enterprises or via managed backup service providers, Televaulting provides customers with the most efficient enterprise backup solution available, ushering in the era of green storage.”

About Asigra
Asigra is the award-winning leader in remote office/branch office (ROBO) online backup and recovery software for managed backup service providers and enterprises. The company’s flagship product, Televaulting, is used by global enterprises in the financial, insurance, legal, government, healthcare, and retail industries with more than four petabytes of data protected. Asigra technology is used by hundreds of service providers worldwide that offer managed backup services to companies ranging from small and medium businesses (SMBs) to Global 2000 enterprises. The agentless remote site backup and recovery solution provides simple, centralized management of the data protection process while eliminating the capital and operational expenses associated with agent-based solutions. Founded in 1986, Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with partner offices around the world. For more information, visit www.asigra.com.
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Asigra, Televaulting, BLM and the Asigra logo are trademarks of Asigra Inc. All other brand and product names are, or may be, trademarks of their respective owners.