In an article for Enterprise Storage Forum, Paul Shread comments on the positive reviews that various deduplication technologies got at Storage Decisions from analysts and end users. He suggests that less than 10% of attendees were using deduplication already, but that others were inspired by their experience and would be using it soon.

Paul goes on to quote me, saying I “didn’t think primary data de-duplication technology was ready for prime time just yet.” I absolutely did say these words, but I am not sure if my point came across.

I’ve recently expounded about the benefits of deduplication technology, but have warned that it might not be all it’s cracked up to be in primary storage environments. By “primary” I mean those storage environments serving mission-critical applications. Although dedupe works great for backup and archiving, the random I/O, low latency, and high throughput of primary storage (and especially virtualized servers) might be too much for current systems. And as of now, only NetApp, Riverbed (soon), and startups greenBytes (see my story) and Ocarina (more on them another time) were willing to go on record with me as supporting deduplication of primary storage.

So what I meant was that deduplication is not yet ready for prime time in primary storage applications. No one should hesitate to use the technology for backup or archiving at this point, but make sure you do a thorough evaluation of the specific product you are selecting to make sure it delivers the performance you require!

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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I’ve long hollered that ZFS is a real storage revolution in the making, but recognized that it still had a way to go before replacing UFS, HFS+, and most volume managers. Well, a little Rhode Island company called greenBytes comes out of stealth today to announce that they’re doing just that - taking the solid ZFS core and adding some serious enterprise storage features to it. And they’re rolling the lot into a multi-protocol storage array using commodity (Sun Thumper) hardware. These guys have cooked up a seriously interesting entrant in the storage market, though I can’t say much for the decapitated camel-case spelling of their (already in use) name!

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Watching the announcements coming out of EMC World today, one bit of jargon stuck out at me:  The EMC bloggers are starting to refer to “data deduplication” as “3D”.  I had never heard this terminology before yesterday, but the EMCers are all using it, so it must be a popular term inside that company.  So I’m just giving my readers a heads-up: 3D is deduplication, at least at EMC.