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Source vs. Target Deduplication: Scale Matters: Page 2 of 2

One major sticking point remaining is that most source deduplication systems can't hold as much data as a DD890 or other big honking backup appliance. By all accounts I can find, Avamar is the best-selling source deduplicating software package today. However, an Avamar data store can only grow to a 16-node RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes) with a total capacity of about 53TBytes (net after RAID but before deduplication), while a DD890, also from EMC, can hold about 300TBytes.

53TBytes before deduplication, which probably means 300TBytes to 800TBytes of actual backup data, is a lot of storage for most of us. Some large enterprises with more data than that would have to create multiple repositories. These repositories, in addition to being more work to manage, will reduce the deduplication rate because each repository will be an independent deduplication realm. 

Disclaimer: EMC, Quantum and Symantec are, or have been, clients of DeepStorage.net, of which I am founder and chief scientist. Of course, they're on both sides of this question.