Executive summary

Rather than spending IT dollars on infrastructure and overheads, today’s businesses need their IT dollars to go toward delivering new applications to help them to be more competitive in the business they're in, help them enter new businesses, and to support business transformation. Businesses everywhere are counting on IT to deliver more value to their business. HP believes that IT has the resources to do it. The problem is, because of the sprawl of data and systems, those resources are tangled up in the overheads of legacy architectures and inflexible stacks of IT.

Data explosion is a primary contributor to IT sprawl, inefficiency, and waste. The data growth challenge is particularly acute when looking at how much time and money customers spend in managing data protection processes and the ever growing mountain of archival and offline data. The digital data universe grew to 800 billion gigabytes in 2009, an increase of 62 percent from the 2008 figures, and it doesn’t stop there; the digital data universe is expected to grow by 44 times between 2010 and 2020.1 It’s no surprise then, that a 2010 Storage Priorities Survey. Data deduplication has emerged as one of the fastest growing datacenter technologies in recent years. With the ability to decrease redundancy and so retain typically 20x more data on disk, it continues to attract tremendous interest in response to data growth. However, implementations of first generations of deduplication technology have become extremely complex, with numerous point solutions, rigid solution stacks, scalability limitations, and fragmented heterogeneous approaches. This complexity results in increased risk, extra cost, and management overhead. reported that Enterprise storage managers list two of their three top storage priorities to be related to data protection; namely data backup and disaster recovery. Data deduplication continues to be the likeliest new technology to be added to backup operations, with 61 percent of customers in the storage priorities survey either deploying or evaluating it, and that’s on top of the 23 percent of current deduplication users.

Data deduplication has emerged as one of the fastest growing datacenter technologies in recent years. With the ability to decrease redundancy and so retain typically 20x more data on disk, it continues to attract tremendous interest in response to data growth. However, implementations of first generations of deduplication technology have become extremely complex, with numerous point solutions, rigid solution stacks, scalability limitations, and fragmented heterogeneous approaches. This complexity results in increased risk, extra cost, and management overhead.

This whitepaper introduces and describes StoreOnce software, next-generation deduplication technology from HP that allows for better management, higher performance, and more efficient data protection, while providing IT administrators with a cost-effective way to control unrelenting data growth.