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Do We Need Primary Storage Deduplication?: Page 2 of 2

With the recent buzz around a few new primary storage deduplication products, I've seen the question of primary storage deduplication's value come up more than once. After all, if you are managing your storage correctly there shouldn't be much duplicate data, especially on primary storage right? Sure, and we all archive all of our old data to tape as soon as it has not been accessed for 90 days. Even in a well-managed system there is redundant data on primary storage, so deduplication's benefits
George Crump
June 09, 2010

A lot has to occur for this level of data optimization to become a reality. First, the primary storage vendors need to offer a deduplication engine in their storage solution. Second the deduplication process and its handling of the meta data will also need to prove its reliability. Only time will provide that assurance. Until then, and for quite a while, I expect users to deploy deduplication slowly with much testing. I do believe that dedupe on primary storage will eventually prove itself to be reliable. At that point, it will be interesting to see if deduplication downstream will be rendered obsolete. My guess is that it will not. While some users may place all their faith in primary deduplication, there is a certain comfort and maybe even indisputable common sense to keep a separate copy of data on a totally different storage device.

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