Shrinking Backup And Recovery Costs

Even if the economy picks up for real, business-technology execs will stay true to at least two lessons learned since 2000: Recovering data during times of need is critical to all, and few can afford to make inefficient use of business-technology resources.

Data Domain Inc. could satisfy both needs with the DD200 Restorer appliance it will unveil next week. A file system inside the appliance makes sure nothing is copied twice and compresses information by 20 times before moving it from one source to another.

Storage leader EMC Corp. could offer its own recovery systems, but Steve Kenniston, an analyst at The Enterprise Storage Group, says they don't have the intelligence to compress the information and lower the costs. He says the DD200 should give customers the high-speed performance of disk-based storage, validated information for recovery, and less information to manage. Says Kenniston, "It adds up to big, big value for customers."