Adoption of deduplication technology triples in four months

Network Applicance (NetApp) yesterday announced that the deduplication 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 claims more than 1,000 customers have deployed deduplication across all tiers of data, including primary, backup, and archival data.

Deduplication technology, which plays an important role in virtualised environments, is quickly gaining traction with customers who struggle with data proliferation.

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

NetApp claims it is the only major storage and data management vendor to embed deduplication technology across its entire line of storage systems and to provide an end to end solution.

Enterprise Strategy Group analyst, Heidi Biggar, said there is a definite trend in the market today to virtualise storage environments.

"Deduplication is just one example. Organisations are embracing deduplication because of the efficiencies it provides their organisations, significantly reducing the amount of physical capacity that must be purchased and managed," she said.

Dexma, a company that creates and hosts mortgage lending software for financial institutions, has leveraged deduplication to help realise greater data storage management capabilities.

By combining NetApp and VMware solutions, Dexma has created a virtual environment that enhances storage provisioning and increases Dexma's 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 utilised disk space.

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

"We were able to decrease our storage requirements for our customer file retention by 35 per cent," 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 deduplication.

"Technological advancements in data deduplication across the industry are making this a must-have feature for many of our customers," Grillo said.

"We know how important features such as virtualisation, policy management, and deduplication are to customers, and through our partnership with NetApp we are providing them with a choice of data deduplication technology."

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Deduplication, 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 deduplication 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.

NetApp vice president of solutions marketing, Patrick Rogers, said deduplication has become a core element of its storage system offerings as more customers grapple with data growth proliferation.

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 of 2008 have more than doubled the maximum usable storage capacity of NearStore VTL and increased write-compressed performance by up to 20 per cent, enabling enterprise customers to protect more data in less time.