Increasing demand by IT buyers for greater storage efficiencies will drive adoption of deduplication solutions over the next 12 months, research firm, IDC reported on Wednesday.
According to new survey results from IDC, over 60 percent of respondents are either in the process of deduplicating or have plans to deduplicate their primary, backup, or archive data in the coming year. Respondents had to be investigating, evaluating, or using some form of deduplication to be included in the survey.
"The tipping point for spending on deduplication solutions stems from larger projects around improving storage performance, virtualizing servers, and disaster recovery," said Laura Dubois, program director, Storage Software. "The importance of deduplication and the opportunities it presents were validated by the public bidding war waged in 2009 between EMC and NetApp for deduplication heavyweight, Data Domain."
Firms with more than 6 PB (petabytes) of total disk storage place higher priority on storage performance as a driver, and 57.5 percent of survey respondents said their organizations are currently implementing deduplication or have already deduplicated primary data including virtual servers. Overall, deduplication usage and plans are comparable for backup and primary data, and only slightly lower for archive data. Additionally, users' satisfaction with deduplication technology is highest in the areas of performance, overall system, and management.
The IDC survey also found that the areas for deduplication improvement include implementation, ROI (return on investment), and vendor commitments, while EMC (including Data Domain) and NetApp dominate hardware-based deduplication. It also found that EMC, Symantec, and IBM dominate software-based deduplication, and that 32.4 percent of respondents were able to or will eliminate tape as a result of deduplication with 59 percent of respondents citing they have or will reduce tape. IDC also found that deduplication for backup shows greatest opportunity for firms with 5,000-9,999 employees and 6-49 PB of disk storage.
