IBM has announced a major enhancement to its industry-leading data deduplication solution that offers dramatic business continuity improvements, allowing organizations to quickly recover and become operational faster in the event of a disaster.

IBM is adding electronic data transfer capabilities, or native replication, to the ProtecTIER Deduplication product line, providing organizations with improved data protection and business continuity by electronically transmitting deduplicated data to remote sites, dramatically reducing bandwidth requirements, and eliminating the need to physically transport tapes to a remote site.

Replication has been used for decades to enable mission-critical data to be protected remotely; however, the high costs associated with network bandwidth and the cost of storage required to keep data online meant that replication was reserved for a company’s most critical applications and data.

IBM’s approach addresses the high cost of network bandwidth, enabling companies to replicate more data at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches. Leveraging ProtecTIER’s patented deduplication technology, only a small amount of unique data is sent across the network at any given time, ultimately enabling a large amount of data to be transmitted with minimal bandwidth. The cost reduction enabled by this approach means that electronic replication is not just viable for tier-one applications, but all applications.

“Customers have been implementing IBM ProtecTIER TS7650 deduplication solutions because of its industry-leading, high-performance and high data integrity capabilities,” said Cindy Grossman, IBM vice president, System Storage. “Now, with ProtecTIER native replication, users can protect deduplicated data at remote locations with greatly reduced bandwidth costs, helping to improve disaster recovery operations.”

In 2005, ProtecTIER helped change the way organizations approached data protection by introducing the first deduplication virtual tape library (VTL) solution on the market. Today, most VTL systems have some form of deduplication, and it’s expected that deduplication will become ubiquitous in IT data centers around the globe in the next five years.

Earlier this year, IBM, announced the TS7650 ProtecTIER Deduplication Appliance, an integrated appliance, including a server, storage, and data deduplication software that eliminates redundant data and empowers customers to retain data longer, protect data more efficiently and reliably, and save money by reducing energy, floor space, and maintenance requirements.

Native replication will be available September 4, 2009 and will be an optional additionally priced feature. A software upgrade will be available for all existing TS7650G ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway and TS7650 ProtecTIER Deduplication Appliance configurations.