Enterprises are seeking new ways to tackle their data protection challenges. While data growth is not new, the pace of growth has become more rapid, the location of data more dispersed, and the linkage between data sets more complex. Data deduplication offers companies the opportunity to dramatically reduce the amount of storage required for backups and to more efficiently centralize backup data to multiple sites for assured disaster recovery. Veritas NetBackup PureDisk from Symantec uses data deduplication technology to help customers address these data protection challenges.

At the heart of NetBackup PureDisk customers will find flexible deduplication technology, a highly scalable software-based storage system, and integration with NetBackup for greater functionality. PureDisk deduplication technology can be deployed into backup environments in two different places. It can be deployed at the start of the backup process by placing a PureDisk client on the server; or it can be employed, without a client, at the end of the backup process when a NetBackup media server writes data to disk. Regardless of where it is deployed NetBackup PureDisk can improve the backup process and help to accomplish the following:

• Reduce bandwidth consumed by traditional network based backups by up to 500x
• Reduce backup storage consumption by 10 to 50 times as compared to traditional tape-based backup methods

Although data deduplication technology has existed for more than five years, most organizations have yet to take advantage of the dramatic operational and storage efficiencies to be gained through deduplication. This paper examines five customer environments and presents the results achieved with NetBackup PureDisk across a mix of environments, operating systems, and applications. A sample of their environments revealed the following:

• PureDisk can reduce backup storage by 10x or greater when compared to traditional backup methods with tape media
• PureDisk deduplication reduces bandwidth by 97% or more for file servers with office data
• PureDisk can reduces storage for Microsoft Exchange PST backups by 98% or higher