Treating Data Symptoms Versus the Disease

When it comes to managing the exponential growth of data across the enterprise, a question that need to be asked is whether we’re treating the symptoms or the disease?

The folks at Syncsort are making a case that too much of the effort associated with managing data these days is focused on data deduplication on secondary storage systems versus actually solving the real issues on the server in the first place.

Peter Eicher, senior product marketing specialist for Syncsort, says Syncsort solves this problem by inserting software into the file system that keeps track of all the changes to the physical blocks on the disks. Those changes are then passed along to the backup system to create a stream of continuous updates.

That means, says Eicher, there is no need to regularly back up entire files, and the amount of data that needs to be transferred to the backup system is sharply reduced. In effect, there is no backup window to close, says Eicher.

Syncsort takes this approach to data reduction to market in concert with NetApp, which provides the backup systems.

At the end of the day, all the noise about data deduplication performance is fundamentally missing the point, adds Eicher. The real issue, says Eicher, is to not create duplicate data on the backup system in the first place.