Deduplication as a Storage Management Strategy

Deduplication is a hot topic in the backup market, and it is a storage management technology that the industry expects to see as a standard feature on most mid-market and enterprise storage products by 2012. According to this Computer Technology Review, one driving factor in the growth of dedupe is economic pressure and tightened budgets that has enterprise storage buyers willing to look at new technology that can store data more efficiently and at less cost.

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"This blossoming of dedupe is happening faster than with other value-add storage features that have followed similar paths. Data reduction in general, and dedupe in particular, represents a technology whose time seems to have come. There are two drivers. One is the exponential storage growth putting strain on both capital expenditures in IT and outpacing the ability of cheap disk drives to keep up. The other is that economic pressure and tightened budgets have made the traditionally conservative enterprise storage buyer willing to look at new technology that can store data more efficiently and at less cost. It’s also a technology that works because the data driving storage growth is unstructured data, data created by people. Database business applications are not driving storage growth – people are. It’s office documents, email, photos, and videos that are driving the information revolution, and it is in the nature of humans to create lots of copies, variants, and versions of information – in other words, humans (as opposed to database applications) are a lot more likely to create a bunch of duplicate inefficiently-stored data. Dedupe goes and finds all that, and takes the unnecessary copies out of the picture, and on the actual storage, all those duplicate copies point to one shared place. The benefits are compelling – it’s not just saving disk space, but ultimately it’s also saving power, cooling, rack space, and all the other things you didn’t have to buy when you avoided buying another rack of disks."

Read the Full Story at Computer Technology Review