Online Backup Sleight of Hand

You wouldn't call it a conspiracy, but it is strange. Online data backup and storage benefits greatly from the efficiencies of deduplication, yet many of our competitors don't mention its benefits to their customers. The reason - deduplication can be a huge money maker for these companies.

Deduplication of data is in the news daily, particularly with the recent conquest of Data Domain by EMC over NetApp. The level of passion involved in the market is evidenced by the fun video, NetApp Battles the Competition, below.

When is a Gigabyte not a Gigabyte?
So why is deduplication so important for online backup companies? The short story is that most companies bill by data size - i.e. $0.50/GB up to $10/GB and more. However a GB of data on a laptop or server is not the same GB that is stored with backup. Through the process of deduplication, data that is redundant on multiple computers or devices needs only to be stored once at the backup location. As a simple example, MS Office 2007 Office program files take up 859 MB of disk space on a computer. If these files can be backed up for 100 computers using deduplication the disk space required on the backup server would be only 859 MB. If a company paid $0.50/GB to backup these files they would pay $42.95 to backup up less than one GB of stored data or about $50/GB. Now that's good business.

While this example is simplified, the point is clear. Deduplication makes a big difference in the amount of data stored and the cost of that storage. DataPreserve Pro passes this duplication benefit on to its MSP customers to allow them to share in the profits and witness the tremendous benefits that come with the backup of multiple similar devices. The published DataPreserve Pro pricing reflects the GB size actually stored on our servers, compressed and deduplicated. So for MSPs who want to share in the profits on online backup without having the investment or headaches, outsourcing with DataPreserve makes sense financially.

Of course there are many other advantages to a backup solution with good deduplication at the source - faster backups, cleaners restores, easier management of data, etc. See this interview with Bill Andrews of ExaGrid in Forbes.