Blocklets Boost De-duplication

December 18th, 2006: “People want to keep more on disk, but disk still costs more than tape,” says Quantum’s Australia country manager, Craig Tamlin.

In an ideal world we would have all the data we wanted whenever we wanted it. The problem is that this costs money, which is why Tamlin is so excited about the release of Blocklets - a de-duplication solution to be released with its DX virtual tape libraries in the first quarter of 2007. Quantum says it will allow the backup of 1TB in 300-700GB depending on the commonality held within it.

Tamlin says this is the most exciting thing to happen in storage in the last decade. For a man who has been in the industry for 15 years, this is quite a statement.

Blocklets was developed by Adelaide-based software developer, RedRock – a company that was acquired by ADIC in March 2006 for a tidy $64 million, which was in turn acquired by Quantum in August 2006.

The key for the user is that they will have the ability to store more information on high availability systems. That is, more information can be stored on disk rather than forcing data to be moved to tape. The solution works on the premise that much of the data that is backed up does not change. At most this is around five to 10 percent Quantum claims. Blocklets looks for patterns and where data is identical, stores it only once and uses tags to identify where that data is repeated.

Quantum believes the real advantage is shown where data replication forms part of an organisation’s recovery strategy. For organisations sending large amounts of data on a network, this should reduce the amount of data being sent across it. In the case of a branch office, where backup processes are more difficult to manage, this can provide a new means of backing up. Instead of relying on the branch office to backup via tape, organisations may be more inclined to send data back to head office where processes are managed with greater efficacy.

As yet no price has been set for Blocklets.

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