Moderator: Peter Burris
Today is June 30, 2008 in the forecasting game we played at the Tuesday, June 5, 2006 Wikibon Peer Incite Meeting. We "looked back" at what has occurred in the past year (June 2007-June 2008) to foster the emergence of deduplication as a customer purchase requirement in data protection products, based on a prediction being tested by Storage Markets. We convened the Wikibon community to talk about the key factors that must have occurred for this prediction to transpire.
First it seems clear that tape vendors, pushed by eroding price points driven by competition from disk technology, will have started to discuss the creation of a data deduplication standard and announced schedules for developing an industry implementation of that standard. This standard is expected to be incorporated in virtual tape libraries and eventually tape controllers. The driving force in this will have been IBM, the force behind most tape standards of the past three decades, which is seeking to unify its tape and disk businesses by implementing the new standard in both sets of products. This also has the effect of moving more processing from servers into the tape and disk controllers.
At present, users by and large continue to recognize tape as the most cost-effective choice for meeting the recovery point objectives of their disaster recovery plans. Despite lower compression ratios available on some other technologies, tape still has the advantage that it can be moved from one place to another over great distances at low cost with high certitude of safe arrival compared to transporting the same volume of data via network. However disk economics are growing in attractiveness, prompting the major tape system providers to announce joint support for the deduplication standard to reestablish leadership in the backup/restore marketplace and stop price erosion.
Disk vendors, on the other hand, will have had a lukewarm response to the new standard but nonetheless show a willingness to respond if in fact real market momentum develops behind it. We expect however that it will take six months to a year for them to move toward compliance to the standard.
One reason users will have been forcing this issue is the realization that, at this point in technological development, data deduplication provides an easier and more natural path to significant cost savings than thin provisioning. Consequently in the “last” year we will have seen much more rapid development and deployment of deduplication products than of thin provisioning. Interest remains high in thin provisioning, however, and we still expect more action in this area in the future.
Finally, we will have seen the first hints of business and government action to push standards as a way to ensure that they can remain in control of their data and not become locked into proprietary traps in the face of increasing concern about the realities of managing information assets and liabilities. Specifically, the European Union will have started the first hearings toward potential regulatory requirements for data quality, data control and data distribution, forcing large institutions to drive their compliance efforts down closer to the technologies that service the applications that are central to business activity.
Action Item: It will have appeared that users will have adopted data deduplication as an important first step in facilitating the transformation in how they administer storage in a storage market that currently is experiencing significant change. Users should continue to drive their suppliers to greater support of standards that will improve users’ ability to manage their information liabilities and assets. However, they should not regard deduplication as a cure-all for out-of-control data growth. Dedup is most effective in data backup and recovery applications, where large volumes of unchanged data are being stored over and over. In other applications, such as ERP and CRM, dedup will not offer major advantages. In these applications users will be best advised to wait for the development of thin provisioning technology.
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