eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Data deduplication, which began getting serious attention from the enterprise IT industry in late 2006 when EMC bought Avamar Technologies, has become a rapidly growing subsector in storage since that time. All the major systems vendors and storage companies large and small now have their own “dedupe” options; it’s become a standard requirement for storage buys.
For the record: Data deduplication eliminates redundant data from a disk storage device in order to lower storage space requirements, which in turn lowers data center power and cooling costs and lessens the amount of carbon dioxide produced to generate power to run the hardware.
Two of the more successful independent storage providers, Data Domain and NetApp, have done well in dedupe sales. In fact, NetApp on May 14 said through April of this year, 7,200 of its customers activated deduplication on more than 37,000 systems, representing a very healthy 514 petabytes’ worth of usable storage capacity that has deduped content.
To repeat: That’s more than 500 petabytes. Just making sure you are paying attention. That’s a lot of capacity — and a lot of excess data that is now nonexistent.
NetApp’s deduplication feature is available on its V-Series virtualized storage systems and virtual tape libraries. NetApp’s deduplication also can be run on storage systems supplied by EMC, Hewlett-Packard and Hitachi Data Systems.