NetApp Expands Deduplication Support

May 17, 2007: Netapp has taken a big leap forward with data deduplication technology this week, announcing that its new NearStore and FAS storage systems now feature advanced single-instance storage (A-SIS) deduplication.

NetApp’s inclusion of the technology in its Fabric Attached Storage (FAS) and NearStore appliances is an industry first that enables deduplication across backup, archival, compliance and primary data storage environments.

The company claims that the technology helps reduce the amount of storage required, cutting initial purchase costs, management costs and physical costs such as power, cooling and data centre real estate.

“Deduplication, at its core, is another form of data virtualisation, in which one physical copy represents many logical copies," says Tony Asaro a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. “Deduplication creates a domino effect of efficiency, reducing capital, administrative, and facility costs. “

NetApp backs up its savings claim pointing to CommVault’s recent testing gof A-SIS with its backup software. CommVault found that deduplication resulted in a 20:1 space saving over traditional backup models, adding that it is possible that even greater compression ratios will be achieved over time.

NetApp says that A-SIS can be enabled FAS and NearStore systems with one command, running invisibly in the background with virtually no read/write performance overhead.

“With A-SIS, we're providing customers the universal ability to save space and reduce storage costs regardless of how or where the data comes from,” says Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “Since A-SIS deduplication is now integral to NetApp storage platforms, customers get the benefits of deduplication while taking advantage of all NetApp reliability features such as RAID-DP. With the general availability of A-SIS, we are adding another significant space savings capability to our strong portfolio of space savings technologies, including Snapshot, thin provisioning, and storage free clones.”

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