In what seems to be a theme this week in Online Storage Optimization–we’re all about what’s next, and what’s “out there” in the stratosphere. We’re also not beneath making as many pop cultural sci fi references as we can. That’s just the way we roll.
Analyst George Crump had a nice piece in Networking Computing (the new umbrella publication that has eaten Byte and Switch for breakfast). His article, “Deduplication Moves Beyond Deduplication” gives a good overview of the state of dedupe and where it might be headed. For those of you who have been reading this blog regularly, we’re predicting a major leap in innovation around dedupe.
We see an end-to-end or “global dedupe” as the obvious next step for this groundbreaking technology. As Carter George, our lead writer noted a recent post: we see a future in which dedupe will have post process architecture, and will find duplicates across multiple nodes and multiple storage pools. It will also integrate a combination of technologies–most likely the best will be those that have both dedupe and content aware compression. This has been the direction that this blog’s parent Ocarina has taken, and it has proven a very wise strategy.
As Crump notes, Ocarina differs from other solutions in that it “adds deduplication to the process as well as content specific optimizers that provide a greater understanding of the file formats being processed.” The next wave of dedupe, he predicts, will still involve two or three different solutions within an environment. No doubt there will be a path that takes us from here to the ideal of simplification we envision. Meanwhile, they will continue to add features that ensure that the investment in dedupe is amply leveraged.
I’d say that one great example of that is the ability to easily facilitate migration among multiple tiers of storage–in other words, migrating data and tracking its location as part of the optimization process. A solution that can do that in addition to reducing file sizes offers notable savings and simplification on both ends. Oh, did I mention Ocarina already does that?
I really didn’t want to twitter about this because nobody would know I did it. But you need to get out the trivial pursuit for baby boomers the next time and increase the number of pop kulchur references tenfold.
Trivial Pursuit! Oh no… shouldn’t we just be grateful that craze is over? And don’t worry, the pop culti refs will continue apace with each passing post. Until it stops.