Originating Author: David Floyer
IT executives can expect a queue of people wanting to be responsible for saving 50% plus of storage budgets by implementing deduplication. However, one person's savings could easily cost other people plenty. There are clear trade-offs between lowering disk costs, impacting application performance, increasing RPOs, and increasing bandwidth costs. It will be easy for poorly aligned budget systems to drive inappropriate decisions.
Action Item: IT executives should not let deduplication out as an IT infrastructure standard any time soon, especially if no deduplication standard is in place. CTO skunk works or controlled experiments on the total systems impact of deduplication on a few specific applications is appropriate initially to build up practical experience and pragmatic guidelines. IT executives should initially counter excessive vendor hype and dampen expectations for deduplication both within IT and outside IT.