Information Technology Navigator

Author: Brenden Doyle, Senior Consultant 

As with any new target device you might be incorporating into your backup environment, you are usually doing it for one of the following reasons; to increase capacity and /or throughput or to improve manageability. The basic connectivity considerations that you would apply to any backup device such as tape, disk or optical still hold true for deduplication targets.  Because of some of the unique benefits deduplication solutions offer, it is very important that you don't overlook critical architectural components in the quest to best leverage this technology.

For those who still question the maturity of the technology I would remind you that its underpinnings are loosely based on journal file system concepts which I was first exposed to in the open systems world in the early 1990's through the Digital UNIX ADVFS file system. (Remember those guys?)  This type of file system abstracts the address level of the file system from the data level, creating pointers from the address level to common data sets at the data level.  First used for pointer-based snapshots, this concept has since been leveraged for deduplication storing only unique data blocks at the data level and using the address level as a reference.

You are tasked with solving your company's latest IT challenge; you decide to set up a meeting with your favorite and not-so-favorite technology manufacturers. Oh yeah, you also remind yourself to include a meeting with your local VAR who always comes through in a pinch when you actually have to deploy something. In your meetings you hear about solutions that will move, manipulate, protect, and organize your data while getting 35/mpg, run on alternative fuel and go from 0-60 in five seconds. After many hours of technology overload and resetting your focus on the initial task at hand, you run into your boss in the hallway. Your boss asks how the project is moving along, you reply "Great. We will be able to get the entire IT staff to and from the office for a month while carrying a cord of wood, towing the company bulldozer, all on a single tank of gas. Waite a minute, do we even have a company bulldozer?"