IDG Research, FalconStor Find Deduplication Technologies Drive Data Center Optimization

Survey highlights growing market for and proven benefits of deduplication in production environments

Kuala Lumpur 14 May 2013 — FalconStor Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC), a market leader in disk-based data protection, today announced the results of IDG Research Services’ quick poll, “Backup Technologies; the Tale of the Tape.” The independent survey shows that deduplication has entered the mainstream and is effectively addressing the backup and data storage issues caused by exponential data growth. Large enterprises are leading the way – with mid-size companies and small businesses not far behind – in deploying and reporting significant benefits of the technology, including faster backups, quicker recovery, more efficient data management and lower operating costs.

Through its online poll, IDG Research collected information from 215 qualified IT leaders at large, medium and small companies across various industries regarding their use of backup and deduplication technologies. Key survey findings include:
• Fifty-nine percent of all respondents either have a deduplication solution in place (43 percent) or plan to implement one (16 percent).
• An aggregated 52 percent of large enterprises, 32 percent of mid-size companies and 28 percent of SMBs currently have a deduplication solution in place.
• An aggregated 60 to 70 percent of respondents already have achieved or expect to realize faster backups, quicker recovery and improved efficiency with deduplication.
• Forty percent of all respondents, regardless of company size, retain backup data for more than three years.

“Data is growing at the rate of 50 to 60 percent annually, which results in conventional backup and data protection environments becoming an overwhelming, costly burden. Unsure of what else to do, companies have purchased more backup media and spent a lot of money trying to solve the problem. However, with the introduction of deduplication technology, companies were able to cost-efficiently back up information to disk and store data for longer periods of time,” said Suresh Nair, general manager and vice president of sales and marketing of Asia Pacific for FalconStor. “Today, deduplication is an integral aspect of any modern storage strategy. The IDG survey shows that deduplication has been deployed and tested by a wide range of midsize to large enterprises, demonstrating its benefits to the rest of the market and accelerating adoption of the technology.”

The survey data also revealed that an aggregated 59 percent of companies polled are using a combination of disk-based backup and tape storage; and an aggregated 39 percent are using disk-based backup with deduplication. Tape continues to be a cost-effective medium for data archiving, especially as businesses are required to retain records for longer periods of time, while disk-based systems are deployed for faster backup and recovery. Deduplication increases the efficiency of both disk and tape, optimizing the management of both short- and long-term storage.

The FalconStor® Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solution, one of the industry’s fastest and most flexible disk-based backup and deduplication systems, is widely used by enterprises to optimize data backup, recovery, and storage. The FalconStor VTL solution provides customers the flexibility to optimize backup for speed and efficiency by tailoring deduplication processes to the needs of their environment. The system offers an array of deduplication options, including inline, concurrent, post-processing or no deduplication – and the flexibility to deploy them in multiple configurations to match types of data and available storage. Global Deduplication another key feature with FalconStor VTL, further enhances efficiency as it minimizes replication of data between between offices within an organization.

Study demographics
IDG Research polled 215 qualified IT leaders in various industries regarding the current and future use of backup and deduplication technologies. At the time of the survey 33 percent of these individuals worked at firms with more than 5,000 employees; 24 percent had between 1,001 and 5,000 employees; 35 percent had between 101 and 1,000 employees; and eight percent had between 50 and 100 employees.