Coping with data “obesity” has always been a major issue among companies. The easy solution for most is to build more data storage facilities. While this strategy seems to work, it can only sustain storage needs for the short term – and expensive at that.

Ong points out that by deploying deduplication, companies can put their storage on a “diet” to curb data bloat and save costs.

As average storage utilisation of data centres in the country is just 45 per cent, companies need to look at prioritising storage optimisation to cut wastage. Instead of buying more storage to cope with demand, companies may want to consider deduplication, a storage strategy that can help reduce data, management complexity and infrastructure.

“By deploying the deduplication strategy, companies can put their storage on a ‘diet’ to curb data bloat and save costs,” said Symantec Corp’s technical consultant manager, pre-sales Malaysia Ong Kah Wooi.

Deduplication enables companies to avoid having copies of the same files in the storage servers, which quickly eat up storage space.

“If a company is storing the same file multiple times, the software will remove the extra copies and make the single remaining version available to all users,” Ong said.

The software also will strip out data that appears in multiple files and re-insert it when a user opens the file, he pointed out.

Symantec’s senior technical consultant, pre-sales Malaysia Koh Ee Laine said deduplication technology lets companies reduce data in the archives, data centres and remote offices.

In the archive environment, the software can reduce data in Exchange, Domino or SharePoint, with storage reduction from 40 to 80 per cent.

In the data centre, deduplication can save disk capacity by up to 50 times.

Remote offices can get operational savings of up to five times and wide area network bandwidth savings of up to 500 times.

To help companies implement deduplication, Symantec is offering NetBackup, Backup Exec and Enterprise Vault.

Enterprise Vault moves messages, files and SharePoint content directly out of applications such as Exchange, SharePoint and Windows to a deduplicated archive.

Using NetBackup or Backup Exec 2010, companies can deduplicate backups immediately at the client site and centrally manage deduplication in data centres and globally across remote offices. This will enable companies to reduce backup storage by 95 per cent while still providing rapid recovery of applications in the event of a disaster.

These deduplication solutions are targeted across various verticals, including telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing and Government, as well as small and medium-sized enterprises.