Replication and Global Deduplication Offered as Part of Quantum's DXi Architecture

Bringing backup data from remote and branch offices back to a home office is a particularly thorny problem that enterprises continue to face. Directly sending nightly full, incremental or differential backup jobs over a wide area network (WAN) connection back to the home office can saturate the WAN link and cause backups to exceed backup windows and result in failed backups. However the current procedure of backing up data to disk or tape at the remote site perpetuates the problem of how to most efficiently and securely transmit backup data back to the home office or disaster recovery site.

Placing disk-based backup appliances with data deduplication technology at the remote or branch office can be a good first step towards resolving this problem. Bt placing these appliances at the remote site companies keep backup traffic on their local LAN and off of the corporate WAN and backups complete more quickly and within the backup window. Further, the deduplication feature reduces the amount of backup data stored on the appliance so it can keep more data for longer periods of time.

Still, adding disk-based backup and deduplication to remote sites doesn't solve the challenge of consolidating business data within the core data center (home office) or ensuring all corporate data is secure for disaster recovery/business continuance purposes. In this case, one needs to ensure that the offering provides software that replicates data from the remote office back to the central office.

For companies with only one remote office or that just need to replicate data to a disaster recovery site, a number of appliances provide replication to like appliances at the remote site. Since the data is deduplicated before it is replicated, the amount of data that needs to be replicated from the remote office to the home office is minimized and only net new data needs to be replicated back to the target site. This also lessens the network bandwidth requirements and administrators can configure the replication to occur during periods of low network activity.

The difficulty that arises is when companies have multiple or global remote offices and each has a deduplicating backup appliance. If the deduplicating backup appliance only supports a one-to-one replication configuration, the company may need to purchase enough backup deduplicating appliances for the home office to match the number of deduplicating appliances that they have in the remote offices. This approach is very costly, consumes additional data center resources (power, cooling and floor space) and quickly becomes management intensive, especially in remote offices without adequate IT support.

Companies in these situations need to identify vendors that offer a data deduplication architecture that supports a many-to-one replication model and that can also globally deduplicate the data once it receives the data from the remote sites. By supporting a many-to-one configuration, companies only need one deduplicating backup appliance to receive the data from all of its remote sites. The global deduplication feature is needed since it can further reduce the amount of data that companies need to transmit and store on the deduplicating backup appliance at the home office.

This is the architecture that Quantum has adopted for its DXi3500 and DXi5500 appliances and its scalable DXi7500 system to facilitate the deduplication, replication and optimal storage of backup data across an enterprise. In the next blog entry, I'll take a look at how Quantum's DXi-Series supports this architecture and what configuration options this platform provides.