Data deduplication has been a hot topic in the storage
world for the last year or so, and with good reason.
Any technology with the power to tame the relentless growth of
user data is bound to get an IT manager’s interest, as more data
inevitably means a greater management burden and higher operational
costs — both unwelcome in the current economic climate.
Productive and sometimes profligate users are not the only factors
driving exponential data growth — growth is also partly due to the
way that data is protected.
Most protection schemes are based on holding multiple copies of
the data: daily backups, snapshots, replication, archive copies and
RAID overhead all play their part.
The result is a high level of data repetition, duplication and
redundancy, adding to the management burden and making less
efficient use of storage assets.