The two Special Reports in this issue focus on two of the hottest storage technologies in terms of end users’ purchasing plans: data de-duplication and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS).
Once you discount the outrageous de-duplication ratios that vendors are claiming, and sort through the (fading) inline versus post-processing de-duplication debate, the advantages of de-duplication are clear: an impressive reduction in the amount of physical storage required for either secondary or primary storage resources.
However, data de-duplication creates apprehension for many end users. How will it affect existing backup performance? How will it impact the disaster-recovery window? Are you protected from data loss or corruption? What types of applications are supported? Those are just a few of the questions addressed by an Enterprise Strategy Group analyst in the first of the Special Reports in this issue: “Data de-duplication: Questions and answers,” which, in addition to pointing out the advantages of the technology, also examines the trade-offs involved (see p. 14).
Complementing that article, “User survey: Data-protection trends” (see p. 18) presents an overview of a survey of InfoStor’s readers (commissioned by Sepaton) that again points to strong interest in technologies such as data de-duplication, virtual tape libraries (VTLs), and continuous data protection (CDP).
And for more on VTLs and data de-duplication, see “VTLs with de-dupe produce real ROI,” p. 10, in the News Analysis & Trends section. This article presents a series of end-user case studies that clearly demonstrate the benefits of data de-duplication in the context of VTLs.
InfoStor’s readers are by now familiar with the benefits of SAS disk drives, but what may be unclear is how specific architectures and applications are driving end-user adoption of SAS. The second Special Report in this issue examines the advantages of SAS in blade servers.
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Dave Simpson
Editor-in-Chief daves@pennwell.com
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