Introduction: What Can an SLA Do for You?
According to industry experts, there will be over 58 million virtual servers in use by the end of 2010. This represents a huge volume of data being added to environments just in terms of operating system copies, Hypervisors and related data. To make life a little more challenging, research shows that 80 percent of every IT dollar will be spent on infrastructure maintenance, limiting budgets available for new technologies to improve the business. Research also shows that over 70 percent of data created today resides outside of the corporate data center, requiring companies to look for ways to manage and protect data in many locations.
Recent surveys show that nearly two-thirds of companies expect up to 30% data growth in the next 12 months, and 75 percent of companies now expect to be able to restore large quantities of lost data in less than three hours in the event of data corruption, server crash or other type of outage.
If you don’t have proper backup processes and technologies in place, you are playing a dangerous game with your company’s future — it’s not a question of if valuable business data will be lost, but when. And even if you do have a process in place, it might not be able to keep pace with the rising tide of data that is being generated. How can you keep up with the increasing volume of data that needs to be backed up while still assuring compliance with regulations and corporate policies, keeping costs under control and guaranteeing that you can restore the data in a timely fashion? One way is to eliminate backing up the duplicate data that is created every day by your company. The process of eliminating duplicate data is called data deduplication, and the savings in storage and processing time can be significant. A backup solution that provides the ability to deduplicate your data can eliminate enormous amounts of redundant data that is silently drowning your processes and systems.