Does Primary Storage Deduplication Kill Archive And Backup?: Page 2 of 2

I don't think primary storage suppliers are quite there yet. For primary
storage to become archive and at least short term backup, suppliers
will need to offer retention capabilities, improved scaling and
eventually break their dependency on RAID for a protection scheme (at
least on SATA storage). The result is for the near term archive
suppliers still have an important role to play and backup system
suppliers for a potentially longer term. The point is that if a
primary storage supplier wanted to design a single system that could do
it all, the potential now exists.

What will be interesting is if any of these suppliers will be able to
integrate deduplication throughout the stack and all the way through the
backup and replication copies of the data set. I think though for many
users, myself included, there is always a good feeling about having
another set of data on a different storage medium that has no dependency
on the original storage system.

Another impact of this type of storage system is what is the impact on
traditional dual controller architectures. In our next entry we will
look at the potential impact of all of these storage services on those
controllers.