George Crump has a piece in Byte and Switch today that poses an important question: “Can we get to a single point of deduplication?” This is a question that we have taken up in one form or another in some of our recent posts, such as this one and this one.
In the article, Crump asks the question in another way: “… can you have all your data tiers; primary, archive and backup deduplicated by a single engine?”
In light of the recent focus on deduplication, this in my view is a question that really does need to be raised. For how long will the industry to silo out these different tiers for its deduplication solutions? And how much sense does it make to rehydrate data every time you move it, in order to once again deduplicate it? Not a lot.
Crump writes: “The current deduplication vendors could work on building out their solutions to either scale up into primary storage performance (see Data Domain’s DD880) or they could move their existing data duplication technology into other markets; see the increased speed of Ocarina Networks and Permabit as well as their move into cloud storage.”
At the same time, as we’ve pointed out here, online storage is quite a bit different than backups and so far at least, none of the successful backup dedupe vendors – Data Domain, Diligent, Quantum, etc. have been able to break into it. Rather, it is NetApp and Ocarina who have been the trailblazers.
Crump makes another key point:
“NetApp and Ocarina could continue to enhance and improve the re-hydration speed of their technologies to make read performance a non-issue, making primary storage a viable platform. Ocarina can already maintain the deduplicated format as they move through tiers, so landing on backup or archive disk would simply be another move for them.”
This is an interesting observation, and one that is often missed in reporting on both of these solutions. We look forward to seeing more debate and discussion on this issue, which was well kicked off with this piece.
