Deduplication not as silly as it sounds
The drive of modern business is to find a way to make every processes easier, better and faster. Using backup tape is safe and reliable, but not everything needs to go to the archives. A good option might be finding a balance between tape management software and deduplication processes to help your business locate what’s worth keeping and what’s ready to go in the garbage.
Essentially, to ‘dedupe’ is to put a fine-tooth comb to your data cache and see where the redundancies are hiding. It’s like taking a fistfull of M&M’s and going through them over and over until you only have one of each color left, representing the unique data, and gobbling up the pieces that are really just copies of the originals. Deduplication may not be as delicious as eating a bag of candy, but it can be as satisfying for data compression and tape management. If you run deduplication while performing a tape backup, it’s a double whammy of time and cost saving; don’t store things you don’t need to, but take the same amount of time or less to do it.
Managing active and archived information and keeping it free of redundancies will cut down on the amount of storage being used and also makes data easier to find, as it saves you from having to sort through multiple copies. Some packages like Vertices Tape Management System will allow users to schedule job tasks and increase the scope of storage space, giving users a better grasp of their tape management situation, but exercising smart data selection is still essential. In other words, while the system will give you ease and flexibility, it’s up to the user to ensure that garbage isn’t getting fed in.
Using a variety of programs and strategies has always been key to business continuity planning. Even day-to-day operations should try to incorporate the best set of solutions possible to make their backup tape function at its peak for the company, and taking steps to better understand and manipulate the data contained therein will give businesses a grasp of what their physical data load really needs to look like. Smart management will lead to better disaster recovery should the time come.