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Data De-Dupe & Archiving: Page 2 of 2

Another example is VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW). I know of several organizations that are archiving their VMware VMDK files to an archive system for either OS preservation or actual virtual machine archiving to limit virtual machine sprawl.

A final possible use case where there can be benefits is in a combined data backup and archive system. If you have an archive process that moves a file to the archive, and that archive already contains the byte-level information about that file from the backup, you can create your archive with little or no net new storage gain. A couple of considerations here: Make sure your de-dupe system can scale to retain this information in equal fashion. Also make sure your backup software does not write the data in a different byte-pattern stream than does your archive software.

While there are other use cases where de-dupe in archiving shows great reward, it should not be the primary determining factor in selecting an archive system, unless you have one of the specific requirements above. Archive systems need to be examined for scalability, data safety, data security, retention capabilities, non-proprietary access, and power efficiency.

George Crump is founder of Storage Switzerland, which provides strategic consulting and analysis to storage users, suppliers, and integrators. Prior to Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest integrators. Previous installments of his discussion on data de-duplication can be found here.