by Carol Sliwa
While not as hot as data deduplication for backup, primary storage data reduction, which includes data deduplication and data compression techniques, is getting warmer thanks to a scattering of products that try to shrink the data footprint on tier 1 disk.
The companies with offerings in this space are taking a variety of approaches to address the problem. For instance, one primary storage data-reduction approach searches for duplicates at the file level, while others are more granular, comparing data blocks or byte streams, of fixed or variable sizes. Some work post-process, storing the data writes before starting the data deduplication process. And one compression specialist operates inline, in the data path.
