Dedupe Comes of Age

Published by Mike Ivanov | Filed under Mike Ivanov, VP Marketing

As Wayne highlighted in his recent blog post, dedupe is going way beyond backup. 2010 will be the year, we predict, when dedupe comes of age. As this technology has now become broadly accepted, users are starting to ask the question of whether it will ever be viable for anything other than backup. In the recently published 2010 Storage Trends by Rich Castagna at SearchStorage.com, which was conducted in December 2009, some interesting things were highlighted:

I quote from the article:

“Interest in primary data deduplication is even stronger as storage managers struggle to gain an upper hand on capacity growth. Data deduplication for backup has been the hottest storage technology for a couple of years, although our surveys indicate that implementation is still fairly modest with approximately 20% to 25% of enterprise data storage shops using it. However, that hasn’t dampened interest in applying the same techniques to primary or nearline storage. On the Storage Priorities survey, 17% are currently deduping at least some of their non-backup storage, and another 20% have set their sights on adding it in 2010. And like solid state, another 40% will give it a serious look and evaluate it in the coming year.”

Gartner also had similar findings at their Data Center Conference in December 2009.

So, it’s clear that users are starting to ask for this technology to be leveraged in other areas beyond backup.  The question will become whether vendors can deliver the solutions or not.  Where does the technology belong? SAN (block-based) storage? File-based storage? Or higher up in the Operating System or the Applications?  Or perhaps in all layers?  If you could dedupe data with zero impact to performance and no data risk in deploying, wouldn’t you want it to be everywhere?  It’s kind of like having your cake and eating it too!  Let’s see if the vendor community can truly deliver Dedupe 2.0 and give the customers what they are asking for in 2010!