Many experts point to cost-cutting as the thrust behind today’s biggest storage trends, and for good reason, explains Carter George, vice president of products for Ocarina Networks (www.ocarinanetworks.com). Because data centers are being forced to do more with less, they’re moving toward storage efficiency and data reduction technologies (such as thin provisioning, unified storage, data reduction, and compression) as potential answers to that challenge. File storage vendors are leading the charge, with George noting that some companies have made storage efficiency and deduplication the cornerstones of their product and marketing campaigns, an effort that is forcing other storage vendors to fall in line.

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