Conquering the fear of deleting

MANILA, Philippines - Even geeks have fears, great fears. One such fear is the dread of deleting information.

“There is actually a medical reason why deleting is such a difficult thing to do. This is called the compulsive hoarding (CH) syndrome and it is defined as the acquisition of worthless items though they appeared to be of value,” said Symantec Philippines country manager Luichi Robles.

In the IT world, the CH syndrome is very prevalent, according to Robles, because one is always afraid of deleting something important to the business. It could be a file needed for a new formula or a product line, something that may be needed in the future for legal or compliance requirements, or critical data that can be used when disaster strikes.

But when is digital hoarding healthy and when should one draw the line and say enough?

Robles disclosed that the growth of information for the next four years will explode to about 400 percent. However, IT budgets are only projected to grow to an average of 20 percent, while staffing is pegged to increase by only 10 percent.

“There is a limited budget for storage, which will take up more and more of IT budgets. The question we are posing is, why not simply delete information and ask yourself why do you need to keep it forever?” he said.

It’s not a simple proposition, though, unless a technical solution is at hand.

That solution is called deduplication technology, which Symantec, whose mantra these days is “Keep only what you need,” was launched recently in the market.

“If we keep only what we need, then we save on storage space and cost. As we lower storage requirements, it is also easy to find data you need for legal purposes,” Robles said.

At the core of Symantec’s deduplication technology is the NetBackup 7 software that offers complete data protection, while doing away with the need to hoard.

“This is our strategy – protect completely by securing and backing up the data and recover it quickly when needed,” said Raymond Goh, Symantec regional technical director for system engineering and customer advisory services.

Goh explained that the key to this strategy is NetBackup 7’s capability to use duplicate data that exist in the environment, instead of storing everything. 

“NetBackup 7 is about deduplication everywhere (at the source or the media server),” said Goh, explaining further that instead of sending new blocks of data all the time, which consume storage space and bandwidth, the software detects how much of the data being sent over the network are new data and selects these for backing up.

“This results in faster backups, less bandwidth and less storage space,” he said. “This in turn also allows customers to delete data confidently and discover data more efficiently when needed.”

By integrating deduplication closer to the data source at the client, Symantec attests that NetBackup 7 increases the speed and efficiency of backups in remote offices, data centers and virtual environments and reduces network traffic by up to 90 percent.

Deduplication built into the backup client also eliminates the need for additional specialized hardware and configuration since end-users just need to upgrade to the latest version to realize storage savings.

Goh said Symantec’s data protection solution fits organizations of all sizes – from small business to mid-market to enterprise. The software also works in mixed platforms, servers, storage or applications.

So the next time you hesitate to hit the delete button, think tech. There is software help to combat the CH syndrome. Keep only what you need.