NetApp Adds Data De-dupe To Cut Storage Requirements

Storage vendor Network Appliance this week added data de-duplication technology to several of its storage systems, delivering a new way for IT to cut rapidly increasing storage costs.

NetApp said it is now making its single-instance storage de-duplication, A-SIS (Advanced Single Instance Storage,) available on its NetApp NearStore and FAS storage systems. NetApp has made the data de-dupe technology available for more than two years as part of a partnership with Symantec and its NetBackup product.But now, it has added the capability to its own core storage systems, with data de-duplication enabled on FAS and NearStore R200 storage systems with a simple command. The data de-dupe runs in the background, with little-to-no read/write performance overhead, NetApp said.

Data de-duplication helps IT by reducing unique data volumes, thereby reducing the amount of storage to buy and manage. That reduces not only hardware and software costs, but also data center real estate, power and cooling costs as well.

Vendor CommVault has completed testing of A-SIS de-duplication with CommVault backup software. In those tests, users achieved up to a 20-to-1 space savings over traditional models, with the possibility of experiencing even greater compression ratios over time, NetApp said.