Do We Need Consolidated Deduplication?: Page 2 of 4

The reality is that we will not have a consolidated deduplication platform for a while, so hopefully you don't feel that you need it right away. If you have deduplication at all, based on a recent survey we did, less than 20% of data centers had implemented ANY form of deduplication, so you are likely to be using deduplication as part of the backup process. To some extent, then, you have consolidated deduplication by only implementing it on one tier. 

To have a multi-silo deduplication problem, you have to be using the technology on more than one tier. It seems that users are equally split on what that next silo to be optimized is; do you optimize primary or optimize secondary/archive? I think that primary will be the next major target more so than archive. Most archives already have it, so it is really not a decision point, and most archives are weighed as strongly on their retention and scalability capabilities as much as they are on deduplicating data. 

I also think that as the disk archive solutions become faster or the backup deduplication appliances become more archive capable, the two tiers, from a deduplication standpoint, may merge into one and as a result may be the first area of consolidation of deduplication engines.