Data in the federal government is growing 30 percent per year in environments of 50 terabytes or more, much faster than the infrastructure that supports it. To combat that, federal agencies are looking toward deduplication technologies in conjunction with virtualization, said Bob Gourley, the founder of CTOLabs and the former Chief Technology Officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
In a survey of federal government technologists, architects and systems integrators by CTOLabs, 87 percent percent of respondents said data deduplication is a priority while 60 percent said they have plans to implement it within 12 months.
“This is a truly disruptive technology that combined with virtualization will change how agencies operate,” Gourley tells us.
Data deduplication is exactly like it sounds: getting rid of duplicated documents on the server that take up unnecessary space. An example would be a boss sending a spreadsheet to 100 workers who then each save the document to the agency server so there are in fact 100 versions of the same document.
Gourley says that with the increased use of virtualized machines to run multiple operating systems and the increased amount of data being backed up is causing a flood of information to be stored. Data deduplication reduces the amount of communications bandwidth needed.
An important conclusion, Gourley said, is the fact that industry is able to provide integrated concepts that bring together capabilities from multiple partners, like EMC and VMware and Symantec, to facilitate comprehensive solutions.
Other survey highlights:
- Majority Still Utilizing Tape Backup Methodologies
- 67% Intend to Eliminate Tape- Based Systems
- 72% Have Deployed Virtualization
- 80% Not Meeting Backup Window Requirements in Virtual Server Environments
- Data Retention and Disaster Recovery Are Top Concerns
- 80% Are Using Data Deduplication or Plan to Implement Within 12 Months
- 87% of Organizations Rank Data Deduplication as A Priority
- 61% of Non-Users Plan to Deploy Data Deduplication Within 12 Months
- 91% of Users Are Satisfied or Very Satisfied
