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  5. Druva Brings App-aware Dedupe To The Laptop: Page 2 of 2
Data Centers

Druva Brings App-aware Dedupe To The Laptop: Page 2 of 2

Given the fact that almost half the computers in corporate America are laptops, and a significant amount of data is created on those portable devices, I am constantly amazed at how frequently organizations leave the data on those laptops essentially unprotected. By taking a unique application aware approach to data deduplication, Druva's Insync may be the best solution to date to this seemingly intractable problem.
Howard Marks
February 10, 2011

All source deduplication systems break data into chunks, generate hashes for the chunks and compare the hashes against the data at the central repository to determine what data is new on this client and has to be backed up. Other deduplication systems use fixed size chunks or a simple algorithm to chunk the data. While this can be effective when the same data appears in different places, in multiple files it may generate different hash values because it's offset in the chunk from where it was the last time, which reduces the deduplication factor.

Druva's Insync knows the file formats for common applications and breaks the files down into component parts. So if the same .JPEG image is embedded in multiple emails, PowerPoint presentations and word documents, Insync will identify the JPEG as a single chunk and get 100% deduplication on it.  This process can also reduce the CPU load of chunking and hashing as embedded objects will generate fewer large chunks than the alternative.  The technique sounds similar to what Ocarina was pitching before they were acquired by Dell and went quiet last year.

An agent on the user's laptop backs the system up whenever the road warrior coughs up the $12.95 a day for hotel WiFi. Up to 2000 remote systems can backup to a single destination server that can have up to 16TB of storage, in 4TB deduplication realms. Administrators can define what to backup and how much CPU and bandwidth to use for the backup process.  Users can restore from the agent, through web and via iPad self service apps. Admins can also burn off DVDs or do a bare metal restore for the lost, stolen or totally mangled system.

So no more excuses folks.  Laptop data is a corporate asset just like data on the server.  Time to start backing that stuff up.

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