Put the ROI of Deduplication and Replication into a Broader Business Context

An article that appeared back in 2009 on the Forbes website commented on the questions that executive management teams are asking about proposals that they are receiving from their IT departments. Their uncertainty is probably only heightened when their IT departments bring forward a proposal that recommends a seemingly new process that involves the deployment of lesser understood technologies like deduplication and replication.

The author of this Forbes article attended an Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) panel in April 2009 that featured executives from a number of companies. During the presentation, the executives stated they wanted to see their IT departments present them with proposals that demonstrated a return on investment (ROI). However they were concerned that these proposals included technology that was just a new toy for the IT department and did not have much business value.

While the economic climate appears to be improving in 2010, their concerns about their inability to understand the business benefits of new technology still apply. They recognize they need to innovate but, they want proposals that address two key business concerns:

• Solutions must be executed as part of a broader plan. Companies are often facing problems that span across departments and locations. Proposals that just focus on a specific problem without explaining how they fit into a broader context of what the company is trying to accomplish are not prioritized.
• Companies are too complex for sweeping changes. Technologies have to be explained in the context of how they can be implemented in the least disruptive way while proving their benefit. To accomplish that, the proposal should include an explanation of how it can transform fundamental, long standing operations in the company while lowering costs, leveraging current investments, and increasing revenue.

These comments provide some insight into how IT needs to respond and position new data protection technologies such as deduplication and replication in their proposals to executive management. These two technologies are now regularly being proposed as they most effectively address both of the aforementioned concerns.

By dramatically reducing redundant data, deduplication allows for more cost effective short-term backup on high performance disk and complements long-term tape based backup by reducing media requirements to achieve optimal ROI. This allows for a gradual change in architecture while improving results.
 
Secondly, for companies with distributed environments, replication brings it all together by allowing tape replacement in remote sites and consequently reducing costly media and IT staffing requirements. This demonstrates an impact to a company's broader business strategy and will appeal to top level decision makers.

Those who have already implemented these two technologies with products such as Quantum's DXi-Series of deduplication appliances have compelling results to share:

• Deduplication has no impact on backup success rates to disk. Backup to disk (whether or not backup data is deduplicated) results in backup success rates that climb to 99% or more with both backups and recoveries occurring more quickly.
• Backup data is conducive to deduplication. Backups contain a great deal of duplicate data which makes deduplication especially well suited for backup. This can be even more dramatic when backing up virtualized environments. According to a 2009 survey conducted by Quantum of its DXi-Series customers, those users that deduplicated their data saw real reductions in disk usage of 90% or more. This resulted in them spending 48% less on tape media for long term retention.
• Deduplication coupled with replication minimizes the costs and inefficiences associated with distributed backup environments. Many companies face the challenge of having multiple sites with inconsistent and costly backup infrastructures. By deploying deduplication appliances in remote or branch offices and replicating back to a main data center, those challenges are solved.

Companies can then focus their most costly IT staff at the main office and automate backups in other locations. This also eliminates the need for media handling in those locations.

This is why deduplication and replication complement each other so nicely. Since deduplication first reduces the size of the data store, advanced replication solutions such as the Quantum DXi-Series only send changed blocks to the target. This can reduce costly network bandwidth requirements by a factor of 20.

• Deduplication and replication demonstrate ROI in multiple ways. This same Quantum survey found that their customers lowered their off-site vaulting costs by 32%, reduced their tape recall costs by 97% and spent 63% less time managing backup. At the same time, these same users increased their backup speeds by 125% and reduced the number of failed backups by 87%.

• Organizations can still leverage their investment in tape. Tape's roll in the organization is changing. While disk is assuming this new role of short to medium term protection, using tape for long term storage and to meet compliance requirements in main offices and DR sites is still the most viable and cost-effective method. It also allows organizations to leverage their previous investment in tape as part of a more balanced backup solution.

Executive managers are looking to buy new technologies that show an ROI and improve business processes but they also want to understand what it is they are buying, what benefits it will provide and how they can best leverage what they already own. As they do, they are bound to encounter proposals from providers that promise improved end user experiences and projected savings. Quantum takes that a step further by offering ROI services and content that take the customers specific requirements into account and quantify the benefits and cost savings executive management can and should expect when its solution is deployed.