Adoption of de-duplication technology triples in four months

Computerworld Australia - NetApp Inc. on Tuesday announced that the de-duplication adoption rate among its customers has tripled since November 2007, reaching more than 3,500 systems and 100 petabytes (PB) of raw storage capacity.

The storage vendor claimed that more than 1,000 customers have deployed de-duplication across all tiers of data, including primary, backup and archival data.

De-duplication technology, which plays an important role in virtualized environments, is quickly gaining traction among customers who are struggling with data proliferation.

Now customers can eliminate redundant data quickly to improve space and power efficiencies, as well as to reduce the amount of raw storage required.

NetApp claimed that it is the only major storage and data management vendor to embed de-duplication technology across its entire line of storage systems and to provide an end-to-end solution.

Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. analyst Heidi Biggar said there is a definite trend in the market today toward virtualizing storage environments.

"De-duplication is just one example. Organizations are embracing de-duplication because of the efficiencies it provides their organizations [and] significantly reducing the amount of physical capacity that must be purchased and managed," she said.

Dexma Inc., a company that creates and hosts mortgage-lending software for financial institutions, has used de-duplication to expand its data storage management capabilities.

By combining NetApp and VMware Inc. offerings, the company has created a virtual environment that enhances storage provisioning and increases its ability to more easily scale its storage system to meet its data management needs.

Since the installation of NetApp deduplication in September 2007, Dexma has recovered much of its previously utilized disk space.

This has freed up crucial disk space to be used by other applications, according to the David Waterhouse, the company's senior systems administrator.

"We were able to decrease our storage requirements for our customer file retention by 35%," Waterhouse said. "This has had a direct effect on our bottom line."

IBM's manager of worldwide N-series marketing, Stephen Grillo, said its N-series storage customers value the space and power efficiencies that are provided by de-duplication. "Technological advancements in data de-duplication across the industry are making this a must-have feature for many of our customers," he said.

"We know how important features such as virtualization, policy management and de-duplication are to customers, and through our partnership with NetApp, we are providing them with a choice of data de-duplication technology," Grillo said.

De-duplication, which is free of charge to customers as an inherent feature in all NetApp storage systems, will also be free when it is extended to NetApp's virtual tape library (VTL) offering later this year.

The de-duplication option for NearStore VTL will dramatically reduce the cost of storing backups on disk by providing effective storage capacities that are greater than today's systems, according to the vendor.

Patrick Rogers, NetApp vice president of solutions marketing, said de-duplication has become a core element of his company's storage offerings as more customers grapple with growing amounts of data.

While the technology helps customers control growth, Rogers said it's apparent that customers are rethinking their traditional data-backup approaches as VTL becomes more prevalent.

He said recent hardware and software updates introduced in March have more than doubled the maximum usable storage capacity of NearStore VTL and increased write-compressed performance by up to 20%, enabling enterprise customers to protect more data in less time.