Deduplication storage is quickly becoming the standard for disk-based backup and nearline storage use in enterprise data centers across many industries. It delivers clear benefits for the retention, recovery and replication of backup and other nearline data and allows customers to eliminate tape from the processes of both operational recovery and disaster recovery.

This paper examines and quantifies the costs and benefits of backup with deduplication storage as strategic assets for data protection. Three organizations in different industries are discussed as case studies. Each company was examined based on these four criteria. For each of these companies, operational issues were the driving force behind the purchases – the IT managers involved in the decisions wanted more reliable backups with less operator intervention. However, each company's results show a substantial cost savings as well.