A large number of organizations have deployed disk-to-disk backup technologies to improve the speed and reliability of their backup and disaster recovery operations. A growing number of these organizations look to data deduplication to enhance retention periods and reduce the cost of storage for backups and disaster recovery.  This ESG Lab Validation Report examines Hewlett Packard`s family of backup and recovery solutions that combine the power of HP StorageWorks Virtual Library Systems (VLS) in the data center and the agility of HP D2D appliances in remote offices, tied together with HP Data Protector backup and recovery software. Special attention was paid to ease of implementation as well as the solution`s ability to improve the speed and reliability of disk-based data protection while reducing the cost of disk capacity and network bandwidth. Some of the issues associated with choosing a deduplication solution are also explored.