Interest in deduplication is high.  In a recent ESG data protection survey, 38% of respondents cited use of deduplication and another 40% plan to use it in the next 12 to 24 months.  One of the biggest considerations when implementing deduplication is cost.  Those planning to implement deduplication rank cost as the #1 concern—by a nearly 40% margin over the next response, ease of implementation and use.

Budget-conscious buyers may look to their backup software for this feature.  Several backup software solutions have deduplication as an integrated “no cost” feature or as a fee-based add-on option to the base license.  Buyers beware, however … there are hidden costs.

Vendors offering an integrated deduplication feature may require some changes in the architecture of the backup environment to optimize performance.  If the media server carries the deduplication workload, is the media server hardware powerful enough to handle such a CPU-intensive operation?  If not, will the media server hardware have to be replaced with a multi-core server with sufficient computational power to handle the traffic? Or will an additional media server need to be deployed to better distribute the increased load?  In either case, you’re purchasing new hardware.

Another gotcha?  Additional fees for software licensing. There are three basic backup licensing/pricing models:

1. A la carte client/server pricing where a flat rate is charged for server and client licenses needed.
2. Capacity-based pricing where a flat rate per GB or per TB is levied—typically for the capacity of data on the “front-end” of the media server (the physical rather than logical [deduplicated] capacity)
3. A more mainframe-style pricing model based on the number of CPUs/cores needing entitlement (end-users acquire the appropriate number of “units” for the level/tier of all processor cores on which the software is deployed).

For processor-based licensing models, changing the hardware (or adding more hardware) will also impact software licensing.  For upgraded media server hardware, additional “units” for the software that runs on the media server must be purchased, adding some unexpected costs to the use of the free feature.  For client/server licensing, if additional media servers are deployed to distribute processing, additional media server licenses (and possibly some add-on options) will need to be purchased.

Finally, the integrated deduplication feature may not be available in the version upgrade you are due.  If you’ve got a standard license and the feature is only available in the “advanced” license, the path to deduplication may be a paid upgrade path.

So much for free, eh?

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Tags: backup, deduplication, media server, processor