Deduplication Storage for Nearline Applications

Over the recent decade, a fundamental shift has been happening in the way storage systems are deployed in enterprises. The emergence of a new, broadly used tier of storage based on ATA drives in RAID configurations, data stored for light use, reference, backup and archiving has moved from expensive primary storage and awkward tape storage to nearline networked disk storage. While it was broadly dismissed in the early part of the decade as not being sufficiently fast or safe, it turns out it was good enough, and it now accounts for a significant amount of corporate storage deployments.

This process is about to be further expanded through the emergence of deduplication in the nearline storage tier. Data Domain has proven that deduplication can be reliable, fast and easy to manage, all while providing massively disruptive economic differentiation for backup deployments seeking greater retention, replication and recovery speed. A consensus is now emerging that for many other non-backup nearline applications, deduplication will be extremely impactful.