What’s Better, Deduplication or Data Compression?

Cuba Gooding Junior certainly did a fine job in the movie “Jerry McGuire.” Tom Cruise gave one of the best performances of his career in that same film. Gooding won the Oscar.

A similar thing might be happening in the data storage. Deduplication is winning all the plaudits, yet potentially bigger and better things are going on that the media is largely ignoring.

It’s easy to see why dedupe gets all the attention. When you boast 20-to-1 data reduction rates, that means 1 TB takes up only 50 GB of space. But what is often missed in all this is that data compression of larger volumes of data recovers far more storage.

EMC, for example, recently made several announcements on dedupe and data compression. Its Data Domain Boost release received maximum fanfare, its own press conference and room during Chairman Joe Tucci’s keynote. Another announcement on data compression wasn’t even printed off and handed out. It was just mentioned briefly among other news.

But that data compression technology, being given away as a free added feature for EMC Clariion storage arrays, could have far bigger impact in the overall storage networking picture. What EMC is saying is that it can now bring about a 2-to-1 compression ratio of large quantities of data on Clariion. So, if you have 100 TB on an array, this new feature frees up 50 TB. In contrast, Data Domain dedupe appliances at best free up a few TB and cost a significant amount in added hardware.

Read the rest at Enterprise IT Planet.