How Deduplication and Compression Cut Your Storage Costs

Most likely, your data is growing by leaps and bounds. And, while most enterprises are adopting a cloud or multi-cloud strategy to some degree, Gartner states that by 2025 85 percent of infrastructure strategies will integrate on-premises, colocation, cloud, and edge delivery options. It’s important to note that the first item on that list is on-premises. Your organization's data center isn’t going anywhere. And, with IDC predicting the sum of the world’s data will grow to 175ZB by 2025—a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent—whatever portion of your data that's stored on-premises, it will only continue to grow, too. So, how do you control your on-premises storage costs in the face of this growth? Compression and deduplication are two important tools that will help.

Deduplication: Eliminating Redundant Data

Data deduplication is a process that deletes unnecessary copies of data. With every copy taking up space, deduplication can make a huge difference in how much storage you actually need. At a basic level, the deduplication process identifies specific data segments and then compares them to previously stored data. Whenever the data matches, the redundant data isn’t stored, being replaced instead with a reference that points to the previously stored data.

Deduplication is perfect for highly redundant operations like backups. Files or volumes that are backed up weekly, for example, create a large amount of duplicate data. That’s where the deduplication process takes over, analyzing the data and storing only the compressed, unique file segments. By eliminating multiple blocks of the same data you reduce your data footprint, and concurrently, your storage requirements. That saves money.

Beyond storage, deduplication can also limit networking resource requirements by reducing the amount of data traveling across your network. In some solutions, deduplication happens after the data is written to the target backup disk. That adds unnecessary network traffic that can slow everything down.

But not all backup solutions deal with deduplication the same way. With inline deduplication—the process that StorageCraft OneXafe uses—deduplication happens while the data is being ingested by the backup storage device, before it is written to disk. That means less network traffic and a reduced storage footprint. Your data center is also more efficient for the same reason, using less power and onsite storage space. And deduplication makes recovery faster by taking redundant data out of the recovery process.

Compression: Squeezing More from Your Storage

Data compression is the process of reducing the number of bits that are necessary to represent data. Compression algorithms can represent a string of bits—the 0s and 1s that are the foundation of data—with a smaller string of bits by re-encoding the file data. The result is a big reduction in the actual amount of data that needs to be backed up. By reducing the amount of data being stored, compression optimizes backup storage performance, too. As with deduplication, a storage solution like OneXafe offers inline compression, so backup data is compressed before being written to disk. And, again, that saves on network traffic and storage space and less money spent on devices and resources.

Conclusion

You can keep your storage footprint under control and reduce network traffic with the right backup and disaster recovery solution. We suggest you talk to a StorageCraft engineer to get expert help with finding the right solution for your organization.