Following from my NetWorker Survey Results for 2013, I’ve been going through the survey data in more detail, and spotted an interesting (and logical) correlation between the number of clients being protected by NetWorker in businesses and whether or not deduplication is used.
In the graph, the X-Axis is the number of clients (by survey groupings), and the Y-Axis is the percentage of respondents who indicated they used (or didn’t use) deduplication.
Disregarding sites with 1-10 clients due to the sample size, as the number of clients being protected by a business using NetWorker grows, as does the likelihood of deduplication being used. In fact, for those businesses with 5,000 or more clients, deduplication was universally in use.
This serves to highlight an important factor about deduplication – limiting the footprint (and cost) of the disk backup component within an environment. Even in an environment with just 500 clients, the storage savings from using deduplication will be considerable.
If you’re not sure about deduplication yet, keep this graph in mind while you’re counting your clients. The more clients you have, the more likely it is that you’ll reap considerable benefits from introducing deduplication into your environment.