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oo much data, not enough time, not enough storage space, and not enough budget, sound familiar? Since the first mainframes, efforts have been made to optimize storage capacity requirements and data protection processes.

In the open systems world, the issues mentioned above are the same as years ago when the first data deduplication technology became mainstream. Backups are failing, taking too much space, and costing way too much.

Today, data volumes are growing exponentially and organizations of every size are struggling to manage what has become a very expensive problem. Cheaper storage helps, but is not an operationally efficient solution for many workloads. Data needs to be shrunk to more manageable levels. Too much data causes real problems for companies:

• Companies overprovision their backup infrastructure to anticipate rapid future growth. This is expensive.
• Legacy systems can’t cope and backups take too long or are incomplete.
• Companies miss recovery point objectives and recovery time targets.
• Backups overload infrastructure and network bandwidth.
• Companies cannot embrace new technologies, such as cloud backup, because there is too much data to transfer over wide area networks.

Today, new technology advances are needed to combat the unstoppable and exponential growth of virtual machines and data. In this paper, we will cover Arcserve’s approach to data deduplication.