Dell Buys Ocarina Networks. Dedupe For All?

Storage at rest de-duplication has been a growing point of interest for most IT staffs over the last year or so, just because de-duplication allows you to purchase less hardware over time, and if that hardware is a big old storage array sucking a ton of power and costing a not-insignificant amount to install and maintain, well, it’s appealing.

Most of the recent buzz has been about primary storage de-duplication, but that is merely a case of where the market is. Backup de-duplication has existed for a good long while, and secondary storage de-duplication is not new. Only recently have people decided that at-rest de-dupe was stable enough to give it a go on their primary storage – where all the most important and/or active information is kept. I don’t think I’d call it a “movement” yet, but it does seem that the market’s resistance to anything that obfuscates data storage is eroding at a rapid rate due to the cost of the hardware (and attendant maintenance) to keep up with storage growth.