Monday, January 26, 2009

What I'm reading: Jeff Tofano - The Business Benefits of Deduplication

The Business Benefits of Deduplication

The Quantum CTO, Jeff Tofano, had an article published today at eBizQ. This article give a great overview of the evolution of de-duplication technologies and some considerations that people deploying this technology should take into consideration.

As a fun coincidence, I was chatting with Peter Cassidy this morning about the history of the Quantum de-dup backend, the block pool. Peter is the department manager for the Quantum team in Adelaide Austriallia. This team formerly known as Rocksoft brought the deduplication technology into the stroage worked from data security. They developed the de-dup techniques to deal with shipping around cryptographic signature files. They found that these files changes very rarely and they could use the blocklets(TM) concepts to only ship the changes over then network. This evolved into the dedup engine of the Quantum DXi product line.

It is good to have team meetings where you can find out these fun stories.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Jeff's article is truly exhaustive on the subject of deduplication; looks like a good primer for anyone just starting to learn about the topic. I was on a panel regarding deduplication with him last year, and I remember him being very thorough.

As so the business benefits, though, I think that can be summarized much more succinctly. Deduplication saves you money by reducing system footprint, saving purchase costs, power costs, and cooling costs. Of course, this is really only useful if the system with dedupe is already attractively priced even without a high dedupe ratio -- that's why things like Hitachi trying to sell an archive system with dedupe backed by Tagmastore makes no sense at all.

Most dedupe is sold today at the backup/VTL side of things, which is really too late -- it saves a lot of money vs. non-deduped VTL, and some vs. tape, but doesn't cut the big cost: primary storage. Dedupe for primary storage is relatively rare today, and I think it's something we'll see more in 2009.

I've written more about this in my blog, in articles "Deduplication is Not a Feature" and "Cutting Costs with Enterprise Archive" if you'd like to see more of my thoughts.

Regards,
Jered Floyd
CTO, Permabit

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