For Mike Fishell of book publisher Hay House, de-duplication of data was everything.

Fishell, director of IT for Hay House, located in Carlsbad, Calif., installed a Quantum DXi 5500 a year ago.

"We were getting more into audio and video and storage requirements were growing,"  Fishell says. "Our backups were growing in size and putting a strain on our ability to retrieve and recover data."

Fishell until the time of his Quantum DXi purchase had been using an older Scalar 50 and Symantec's NetBackup to protect his data. Now with the DXi 5500, Fishell is able to send data to the virtual tape library and then offload it to tape once a week.

Fishell has seen a huge reduction in data that he backs up and he is able to state it exactly.

"We are seeing 93.36% reduction with the DXI's inline deduplication," Fishell says. "We are starting with over 40TB of data and deduplicating it to 2.66TB."

Fishell's array has a native capacity of 6TB, and he is not using it to full capacity. He sees more performance impact on his network than he does with the backup process.

At this point, Fishell is only considering replication capability.

"Our DR site is only 3 miles away so it's just as easy to drive over there and pick up tapes," Fishell says. "Replication is something I'm looking at because we have an office in New York and we are currently looking at methods of backing up their office."

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.