Eric Slack posts in SearchStorageChannel blog some of the adoption obstacles that dedupe first encountered in coming to market, and the promise that dedupe can now bring to primary storage, in particular tiered architectures:


...Data Domain had this new technology that got us appointments all over town but was a little difficult for users to grasp. We’d spend the first meeting and a good part of subsequent meetings explaining the technology, originally called “commonality factoring.” They did grasp the effective data reduction rate of about 20x, but didn’t like the fact that it was being presented for backup only. We’d explain how the technology relied on the inherent redundancy in backup data and that using it for regular files would net only a fraction of these data reduction percentages....

...data deduping is a storage optimizing technology that can make your tiered storage solution more attractive, especially compared with traditional disk solutions that don’t offer dedupe. In this era of low budgets for new capacity and high requirements for storage utilization, incremental improvements like deduplication can make a difference.



Read the entire post.