Data Deduplication
Data de-duplication (data dedupe) reduces capacity requirements by ensuring that only unique data is written to disk. As backup data is stored, the appliance leverages patented variable length block-level data de-duplication process which identifies unique blocks of data. As backup data is written, unique blocks are identified and only unique backup data is stored. In other words, when a block is ingested that has already been processed, the appliance stores a pointer to the original block instead of copying the block again.
The data dedup process can most closely be defined as "in-line" (or as data is ingested by the appliance) using a buffering process to help speed performance. As data is ingested into the appliance, it is de-duplicated. There is also a post-processing technologies appliance waits for the backup job to be completed before it begins the data dedupe process. Check with a Sencilo Storage Specialist to see which is right for you.
After the data has been fully de-duplicated, the appliance then compresses the data using its built-in hardware compression engine for additional cost- and capacity-savings. A couple of things about should be noted, some vendors do the compression in hardware, other in software, both have benefits and pitfalls associated their compression methods.
To illustrate how this works, consider the diagram shown in Figure Five. Each horizontal row of blocks on the left represents a full backup. The first backup contains three blocks, two of which are unique (blue and yellow). The second full backup includes the same three blocks as in the first backup and adds one unique block (red). Subsequent backups include one more unique block (green). Four full backups composed of 18 blocks worth of data are reduced to 4 before being stored on disk. In this example, data dedupe technology has reduced the required disk capacity after four backups by a factor of 4.5 to one (18 divided by 4 is 4.5).
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