It goes without saying that storage is critical to any businesscontinuity plan. But in the midmarket, companies often have to make agonizing choices over what kind of storage to use. Tape is inexpensive, but slow and hard to manage. Disk-based storage is faster and easier, but as data volumes grow it can become too expensive for midmarket budgets. Fortunately, emerging technologies such as data deduplication and virtualization are making high-end, high-performance storage easier and less expensive to implement.

As more midlevel companies phase out tape and move to disk-based data protection, their needs are becoming more sophisticated. Over the last three years, we've seen a shift to higher level needs from midmarket companies, says Laura DuBois, program director for storage software at IDC. They are starting to look at technologies and approaches that will deliver higher levels of recovery, higher levels of availability and less overhead in the management of those tasks. (See chart on this page.)

This trend presents a rich opportunity for solution providers not only to sell these technologies, but to advise customers on how best to deploy them. There seems to be an underserved opportunity in the midmarket for a variety of software, services and solutions to meet requirements, says DuBois. All the suppliers are targeting the midmarket because there's so much growth there.

Indeed, that growth is one of the reasons that Ingram Micro last summer formed its Infrastructure Technology Solutions (ITS) Division. Midsize companies are the fastestgrowing part of the market,says Scott Look, vice president of the division. The strategy and value proposition of ITS is to simplify, enable and make our partners successful in the midmarket with storage technology solutions.

Overwhelmed with Data
Several factors are taxing the midmarket's infrastructure and pushing it to more sophisticated business continuity strategies. For one thing, there's the ongoing data explosion, which leads to longer backup times and the expense of more media to store all that information. In addition, more companies need to retain data for longer periods to meet regulatory compliance and corporate governance initiatives. And more data takes longer to back up, time that many midmarket companies don't have. For years they've tried to throw more tape at the problem, but now they can't possibly throw enough tape (at it) to stay ahead of the curve, says Shane Jackson, channel product marketing at Data Domain, which makes deduplication storage systems.

Deduplication technology has begun to play a key role. Deduplication does just what it says it gets rid of unnecessary copies of data. If 10 people save the same document to central storage, for example, deduplication makes sure that only one copy of the blocks that represent those files is stored and creates a pointer for each copy. This helps in several ways:

• Faster backups. Deduplication and WAN compression reduces backup times because it transmits only changes, rather than transmitting the entire store of data.
• Reduced storage. Because it backs up only one copy, deduplication reduces the amount of storage required. We can keep three to six months of customer data in our systems, whereas a system without deduplication we would typically keep about two weeks, says Jackson.
• Lower telecom costs. Deduplication reduces bandwidth requirements, and consequently telecommunications costs, notes Rick Walsworth, director of cross-platform software marketing at EMC, which is also in the disaster recovery and deduplication market.

The Virtualization Effect
All of these benefits are magnified, according to experts, when deduplication is used in combination with server virtualization.

As more midsize customers deploy virtualization, they need a workable strategy for backing up the virtual servers. And when the whole point of virtualization is to reduce costs, it doesn't make sense to buy more storage to back up the virtual servers, notes Jackson. Because virtual servers are highly redundant, often using the same operating system image, the same applications and much of the same data, deduplication is ideal for backing them up, he says. With Data Domain's appliance, We see very high deduplication ratios in virtualized environments, says Jackson as high as 60:1 versus the 20:1 ratio typical in normal backup environments.

The use of deduplication in virtualized environments is a booming business for solution providers, says Jim Franklin, director of EMC's channel marketing group. That's where we've seen partners really take off.

Steve Hartenstein, area vice president in New York for MTM Technologies, is finding a good business by combining virtualization and deduplication. Five years ago, midsize clients would have a primary data center with a secondary data center for disaster recovery and business continuity. Now, with virtualization, they are balancing processing loads between the two data centers, rather than just using the second one for backup. That makes their approach to backup and management of storage dramatically different, says Hartenstein. Software solutions like deduplication help them get the best return from their storage investments.

Some solution providers are finding that they can sell deduplication as a service rather than a product. XiloCore, a business-continuity service network formed by two solution providers All Connected and Connecting Point Technology Center offers managed storage, and business-continuity services to small and midsize companies, says Mike Semel, vice president of business continuity and compliance services at Connecting Point. XiloCore uses deduplication software as a key part of its service. It's one of the things that's allowed us to reduce the cost of storage, Semel notes.

In fact, the clear ROI of deduplication is one of the reasons it's so compelling. Rather than talking speeds and feeds, solution providers can stress actual customer savings. That entails using software tools from deduplication vendors and third parties to analyze the client's data and storage needs.

We use tools to help set reasonable expectations for customers based on their actual usage patterns, says Hartenstein. When you deliver on the reasonable expectations and generate the savings you identified, then hopefully you can work with the client to invest some of those savings in more technology.