De-Dup Merely the Tip of the Iceberg

In times of economic downturn, one of the first casualties businesses see is the reduction in IT budgets, which forces managers to do more with less. This is especially difficult when the company continues to produce massive volumes of mission-critical data but can no longer afford to purchase the hardware required to store it. This conundrum has found champions in specialists who have developed technologies to maximize space already available within a company’s storage infrastructure. One of the most buzzed about options this year is that of data de-duplication – a method of reducing storage needs by eliminating redundant files, thereby reducing the amount of disk and tape hardware and media required to retain the data.

Data de-duplication offers many benefits, easing demand on primary disk but also improving how the data is kept over its lifetime in instances such as backup and disaster recovery. But as a post-processing activity, data de-duplication requires an initial investment in additional storage capacity, increasing the very costs that companies hoped to save.

Additionally, de-duplication only reduces data volumes by a marginal 20 to 30 percent after all redundant files have been eliminated. While this is certainly better than retaining multiple copies on expensive storage, the return on investment can be much less than anticipated after additional hardware, processing and power costs are included. Companies may realize additional efficiencies when using data de-duplication with other data reduction technologies, such as data compression or delta differencing.

Another option is to share the disks and arrays directly attached to and/or embedded in servers as if they were part of an external array. This unique concept – Shared Internal Storage – converts unused internal disks and direct attached storage into a shared storage array to utilize underused disks. Investment in storage can be drastically reduced with 100 percent of unused internal disk capacity suddenly available. Shared Internal Storage can be implemented alone or as a complement to traditional external storage to alleviate restrictions in performance, capacity and network bandwidth. This option could be understood as infrastructure de-duplication.

"There is a constant pressure on IT managers to reign in costs associated with data storage while continuing to make it readily available to users and applications when needed," said Jacques Baldinger, CEO of Seanodes, the leading developer and inventor of Shared Internal Storage solutions. "Technologies such as data de-duplication can certainly help alleviate this pressure by reducing redundant files kept under storage but there are prohibitive costs and technological hurdles that need to be considered before the realization of savings can be achieved. With the Shared Internal Storage concept, companies can immediately realize significant savings from leveraging 100 percent of their unused or underused disk capacity while benefiting from the efficient, reliable and user friendly nature of a technology such as our Exanodes."

Exanodes virtualizes application server disks across a server infrastructure eliminating the need for dedicated storage hardware setting new and unrivaled standards for performance, reliability and availability through self healing features, and costs through re-utilization of existing, unused commoditized disks of application servers. Shared Internal Storage takes advantage of what IDC calls an ‘inside-out SAN’ by virtualizing internal storage assets and servers across a shared storage pool of clustered nodes.

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