A couple weeks back, I had an interview with a Symantec executive to discuss about their storage business. When we say storage, we normally think of physical hard drives like Seagate, Western Digital or Maxtor. In Symantec’s case, their storage business is primary in the software and managed services.
That goes without saying that the solutions Symantec is offering in the storage segment are targeted to SMEs and enterprise clients.
(I asked if in the future, when storage capacity becomes bigger, will this same solution be available commercially to individuals. I don’t think that will happen unless you have your own personal data center at home. Maybe if you run your own web hosting from home.)
Four key strategies were discussed in length:
Identify & Reclaim Unused Capacity – most of the time, there’s enough physical storage available; they just don’t know it’s there and how to reclaim that.
Implement Thin Provisioning – more often, allocation for storage exceeds the actual usage so space is wasted if they’re not really used.
Reduce Duplicate Backup Data – a lot of data that are stored in a backup could be duplicates (examples: email attachments, photos, documents, etc.). By eliminating the duplicates, you free up space, thereby saving cost for more storage.
Archive for Optimization – there are cheap backup drives and there are cheaper backup drives. By archiving to the cheaper backups, you optimize and save on cost.
The most common term mention during our discussion was data deduplication. In general, data deduplication refers to eliminating duplicate or redundant information (and ultimately saving time, effort, resources and overall cost). In computer data storage data deduplication is also known as capacity optimization or single-instance storage.
The full transcript of the 57-minute interview (unedited version) can be played below:
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