Data protection has become the most critical IT discipline and businesses have historically chosen the simplest approach to perform this task. However, the simplest approach, such as creating a full backup to tape, is no longer economical nor does it provide the highest availability when compared to the next generation solutions.

This paper compares traditional data protection options and provides an overview of the impact data deduplication is having on the storage industry. Deduplication is quickly gaining momentum in the growing disk-to-disk backup market and offers several significant improvements over traditional data protection methods.

Deduplication can significantly change the economics of storage, dramatically reducing both backup recovery times and making Wide Area backup an operational reality.