Over the past year, several popular trends have emerged from backup and recovery technology. Perhaps the most popular and widely adopted of these is data deduplication. With early adopters in large enterprises showing positive results in reducing storage needs and cost-cutting initiatives, potential clients in small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) are now investigating how it can work for them.
This note examines:
- 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 large enterprises, and it is time for that value to move into the SME space.