Start-up costs slow spread of de-duplication

The medical center is projecting that the product's return on investment will total $300,000 to $400,000 over the next three years. In addition, Blake credits the tool with eliminating the need for Iron Mountain Inc.'s data archiving services, further cutting costs over the period by about $70,000.

Blake noted that while the two Data Domain VTLs were expensive -- $700,000 for both -- the price is about $400,000 less than it would have cost to replace the medical center's aging backup infrastructure, which included a tape library from ADIC fronted by a Centera secondary disk array from EMC.

Blake's IT shop manages medical, clinical, e-mail, database, HR and financial data stored on more than 120 application servers. Boston Medical Center's data grows at 40% to 50% annually. The hospital uses one Data Domain box to back up primary data and then replicates that data to a second array at an off-site facility for disaster recovery purposes.

"Initially, I was nervous about stepping into a space not a lot of other people had tried yet, but Data Domain had another customer that I was able to chat with. Taking time to understand the technology and talking to someone else using it -- learning what he knew -- gave me a comfort level," Blake said.

Computer technician Paul Rivera's comfort level sank when his company's first attempt at de-duplication failed.

When his employer, ENGlobal Corp. wanted to consolidate its e-mail archive, it initially turned to a service provider, Verizon Communications Inc., which used EMC's Avamar software to do the job. But some of ENGlobal's older application servers had problems with Avamar's agents and wouldn't run backups.

James Saar, backup administrator at Houston-based ENGlobal, a provider of engineering and professional services, noted that Verizon had someone else managing the Avamar product, so it took two or three tiers of people to get the backups working again.

So three months ago, ENGlobal decided to bring the de-duplication process in-house using Symantec Corp.'s PureDisk software and NetBackup servers.

With PureDisk, agents can either be placed on host servers in remote sites in order to de-duplicate data prior to transport over a WAN to a data center for backup, or PureDisk can be used at the remote site for local backup and quick restore.

Rivera said ENGlobal didn't give up on de-duplication, because it believed that the technology could significantly slow the growth of storage requirements, enable the company to avoid using tape for restore purposes, and reduce the need for expensive service contracts. He said his company is amortizing the cost of the equipment to about $10,000 per month over the next three years, or about 25% of the price it was paying for Verizon's hosted backup services.