Data Reduction Technologies: What’s the Difference?
A podcast I found at seachcio.com on data reduction, otherwise known as data deduplication.
You wouldn’t think that incremental backups would be news but apparently they are. The notion of making a backup incremental after it was a full backup (post-processing in HP speak) was new to me but backup technology isn’t one of my primary concerns.
Or hasn’t been I suppose I should say.
Incremental and de-duping for backups is well explored and probably needs no help from topic maps. At least per se.
The thought occurs to me that topic maps could assist in mapping advanced data reduction that doesn’t simply eliminate duplicate data within a single backup, but eliminates duplicate data across an enterprise.
Now that would be something different and perhaps a competitive advantage for any vendor wanting to pursue it.
Just in sketch form, create a topic map of the various backups and map the duplicate data across the backups. Then a pointer is created to the master backup that has the duplicate data. It could present to a client as though the data exists as part of the backup.
Using topic maps to reduce duplicate data backups, could strengthen encryption by reducing the footprint of data that has been encrypted. The less an encryption is used, the less data there is for analysis.
Those are nice ways to introduce enterprises to the advantages that topic maps can bring to information driven enterprises.
Questions:
- Search for data reduction and choose one of the products to review.
- Would the suggested use of topic maps to de-dupe backups work for that product? Why/why not? (3-5 pages, citations)
- How would you use topic maps to provide a better, in your opinion) interface to standard backups? (3-5 pages, no citations)
PS: Yes, I know, I didn’t define standard backups in #3. Surprise me. Grab some free or demo backup software and report back with screen shots.