Over the past year, several popular trends have emerged from backup and recovery technology. Perhaps one of the most popular and widely adopted of these is data deduplication. Touting savings in costs and storage space, deduplication has wooed early adopters and quickly made its way upstream. This note looks at:
- The basics. What deduplication technology is and how it works.
- The potential benefits. Reduced storage space, better use of bandwidth, lower costs.
- The potential challenges. Myth-busting hash collisions, how encryption imposes limits on deduplication.
Deduplication has proven its value to the enterprise, and it is time for more cautious adopters to start kicking the tires.