The continuing explosion of data is one of the biggest challenges that IT organizations of all sizes are facing today. IBM is uniquely positioned to help our customers meet this challenge with a holistic approach to data reduction that addresses the major causes of data proliferation as well as meaningful solutions that optimize storage that help to reduce capital and administrative costs while improving service levels.
The first step is to eliminate the number one source of data growth by only backing up the data that has changed since the last backup – almost all backup products on the market force you to perform periodic full backups, which creates enormous amounts of duplicate data.
Second, determine what different types of data you have and categorize it so that you can manage it most effectively, by moving less frequently-accessed data to lower-cost tiers of storage, and by deleting the data that you no longer need or want. By cleaning out your production storage, you will shorten your backup cycles, improve application performance, and delay the acquisition of additional capacity.
Third, put automated processes in place, based on policies that meet business requirements and/or service level agreements, to keep your production systems as clean as possible.
Finally, compress and deduplicate the data you end up putting into your data protection and retention systems.
