This is a follow-up to my story, De-Duplication Goes Mainstream

Although deduplication of storage is nothing new, with Data Domain and other making hay with the technique for years, it has never been ready for prime time - reduction of active primary storage applications like email and databases. Instead, deduplication has been relegated to second- or third-tier status, deduplicating archives and backup data. But change is in the air, and deduplication vendors are starting to bustle towards the bright lights of primary storage.

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Marc Farley challenged us storage geeks to wave our junk flags and reveal just how many computers we have. Well, I’m really not sure… Let’s see - in order of usefulness…

Networked:

1. Dell XPS M1210 laptop (killer!) with 120GB internal and 500 GB Western Digital My Book backup drive
2. TiVo Series 3 with 250 GB (yeah yeah not yet upgraded)
3. TiVo Series 2 with 140 GB
4. Homebrew Celeron 4 desktop with 320 GB
5. Wife’s Compaq laptop with 100 GB
6. Sa-weet HP Photosmart all-in-one with no storage (but it’s networked!)
7. Linksys 54G running Tomato (16 MB flasher!!)
8. 2 3Com Audreys (16 MB flash bay-bee!)
9. Old junker laptop with 10 GB
10. Virgin Webplayer Internet appliance with 64 MB disk-on-chip
11. Toshiba Portege booting from a 4 GB CompactFlash disk
12. Homebrew AMD K6 system with 20 GB

So my network has up to 11 devices on it… Interesting!

Now for the rest of the machines:

1. 40 GB iPod
2. Nomad Jukebox with 20 GB
3. Atari MegaSTE with 40 MB
4. Atari 1040STFM with a floppy
5. Atari 800XL with a floppy
6. Oldest junkiest Dell 382SX-20 laptop with 20 MB
7. AT&T PC6300 with 20 MB (my first PC)
8. Broken Mac SE

There’s at least a terabyte and a half right there… Plus my collection of odd hard disks - just today I was marveling at the fact that I have 50 MB, 500 MB, 5 GB, 50 GB, and 500 GB hard disks!

Yeah, we’re nuts.