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The Data Squeeze

ProtecTier deduplication offers 25-to-1 reduction and online backup

In June, IBM debuted ProtecTIER* deduplication solutions for AIX* and IBM i. ProtecTIER offers solutions to those who can’t complete backup operations in a given window, have difficulty protecting rapidly growing amounts of data or find their current backup infrastructure unreliable.

With data amounts growing, deduplication is becoming a vital part of data management, backup and recovery. “One of the reasons ProtecTIER is so crucial is because of the crazy growth the world is experiencing as it moves to an all-digital environment,” says Victor Nemechek, ProtecTIER deduplication offering manager at IBM. “Customers are finding their data often doubles or more every year and their current backup systems make it difficult to capture that data, protect it and restore it when they need to.”

For backups many companies use tapes that load data quickly, but present retrieval problems. These challenges—along with reliability problems—sent customers to disk where data was more accessible, but also expensive. Companies used disk for small portions of their most critical data, and kept their other data on tape. “Even with disk for critical data, backup is still an issue because you have a primary disk that you store your data on and you have to have that much disk to back up to, basically doubling your disk needs, and that can be very expensive,” Nemechek says.

“Deduplication can squeeze 25 terabytes of data down to only 1 terabyte of physical disk, so customers can have the speed and reliability of disk but without that one-to-one cost.” —Victor Nemechek, ProtecTIER deduplication offering manager, IBM

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