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.
NetApp
Turning the Page on RAID
This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content. It has been the core technology behind the storage industry since day one, but the sun is setting on traditional RAID technology. After two decades of refinement and fragmentation, we are […]
Grapples and Tangelos: Why it’s Impossible to Compare Fairly
I get the same questions all the time: Should I buy X or Y? Is Z better than Q? But as much as it sounds like a cop-out, I always answer, “well, this sounds like a cop-out, but that depends on what you’re doing with it…” Now EMC’s Chuck Hollis has (bravely) stuck his neck […]
Which Storage Protocol For VMware?
I had two great storage virtualization seminars this week, in New York and Philadelphia. As usual, audience participation was key, and interest in VMware and Hyper-V remains high. One of the main questions I always get is which protocol one should use for VMware storage. My recommendation remains that the answer is an organizational one […]
De-Duplication Goes Mainstream
Lotsa people use and love data de-duplication (to hyphen or not – that is the question) technology for backup and archiving, but it looks like this tech is about to bust out for primary, live, real, mainstream, what-you-are-using-to-store-your-stuff storage. Big news! First up was the company now officially called NetApp, which officially blessed the use […]