Continuing our four-Friday video series, based on the recent ESG research report on the Shift toward Data Protection Appliances,

This installment covers deduplication storage appliances – those wonderful storage devices that drop in existing (or new) backup and archival infrastructures and automagically and radically reduce storage consumption through optimized protection storage.

In case you missed it, we covered Backup Appliances in part 1 of the video series

Here is part 2 in our series — a 4m video on why so many of us utilize deduplication storage “target” solutions:

Thanks for watching – and tune in next week for part 3 on cloud gateways, and then part 4 on BC/DR failover appliances. I hope that this series has been helpful. Please let me know what you think in the comments below.

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Jason Buffington. I’m the Senior Analyst at ESG covering data protection. We recently published a research report on the shift toward data protection appliances. As a reminder, data protection appliances, or DPAs, are more than just purpose built backup appliances, PBBAs as some folks are used to calling them. In fact, PBBAs are just one of at least four DPA categories in use today. With the other categories being dedupe storage targets, cloud-gateways that are used for data protection and BC/DR failover solutions. ESG defines storage or deduplication appliances as not including the backup software. A storage or dedupe appliance is specifically built for deduplication or compression of the data that some other backup, archive or other data-moving engine sends to it.

Dedupe appliances may be physical or virtual or cloudy but the key to the category is they don’t include their own data-mover so they are used to optimize an existing or new backup and archive solution. According to the research, 54% of organizations use dedupe appliances today with another 21% planning on using them and another 14% that are interested. That only leaves 11% of organizations that either don’t want dedupe targets or don’t know yet. That puts deduplication storage appliances as one of the more dominant DPA types in market today but even that isn’t the whole story. To understand how pervasive dedupe appliances are, we asked those folks that are currently using dedupe appliances today about specifically what percentage of their data protection or their secondary storage is within a dedupe appliance versus simple storage and how do they expect that to change over the next two years?

Today, 50% of secondary storage is within deduplication appliances which by the way, that’s 50% of enterprises and 50% of mid-size organizations because they are dedupe solutions for organizations of all sizes. That usage number is expected to grow up to 65% in dedupe storage over the next two years. With production storage growing around 40% year over year and secondary storage often being about 4x the primary between copies for backup and BC/DR and everything else, you absolutely have to find ways to reduce the storage footprint wherever you can. What many IT organizations have discovered is that by providing a better target solution to their existing or new backup software engine, they can significantly decrease their secondary storage footprint which gives a variety of benefits.

For some, dedupe appliances give room to grow without linearly increasing budgets. For others, it enables you to protect your data more frequently within the same footprint. Because many deduplication solutions even provide optimizations for client side deduplication before even leaving the production servers or host, you may find your whole data protection infrastructure and process is optimized just due to the innovations of your dedupe vendor. Dedupe vendors are continuing to innovate as well, whether it be as virtualized appliances that open up new scenarios like branch office protection or MSP enablement as well as cloud accessibility. Those vendors better keep innovating or they’re like to see cloud gateways taking some of their customers while backup appliances offer increasingly efficient software-based deduplication. Stay tuned for more ESG coverage on data protection appliances. Thanks for watching.

[Originally blogged via ESG’s Technical Optimist.com]