IT researcher IDC on Feb. 3 offered additional proof — as if any more is needed — that increasing demand by IT buyers for more efficient storage systems will continue to keep deduplication features in high demand during the next year.
According to its latest survey, nearly two-thirds of the 501 respondents [companies with 100 or more employees] are either in the process of deduplicating their data or have plans to deduplicate their primary, backup, or archived data in the coming year. Respondents were required to be investigating, evaluating, or using some form of deduplication to be included in the survey, the researcher said.
“The tipping point for spending on deduplication solutions stems from larger projects around improving storage performance, virtualizing servers, and disaster recovery,” said Laura Dubois, IDC program director for storage software.
“The importance of deduplication and the opportunities it presents were validated by the public bidding war waged in 2009 between EMC and NetApp for deduplication heavyweight Data Domain.”
Right now, EMC has two brands of dedupe it can offer: DD and Avamar Technologies, a company it bought in 2006. Avamar’s wares are now bringing in more than $250 million per year for its parent company, and the product continues to show growth.
Enterprises with more than 6 petabytes of total disk storage place higher priority on storage performance as a driver, IDC said. About 58 percent of survey respondents said their organizations are currently implementing deduplication or have already deduplicated primary data — including virtual servers.
Deduplication is a trend that is only now starting to flourish. It’s going to keep going up and to the right for a long while.
