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Storage capacity optimization (SCO) offers undeniable economic benefits to enterprises of all sizes by significantly reducing the amount of raw storage capacity required to store any given amount of information. The use of SCO technologies drives savings not only in hardware and software purchases, but also in cooling, floor space, administration, and network capacity (bandwidth) expense. The most commonly deployed SCO technology is data deduplication, and there has been considerable controversy among vendors about the "best" approach to deploying deduplication technology.

The primary deployment environment today for data deduplication is secondary storage. Secondary storage applications such as backup and archive have characteristics, such as medium to high latency of access requirements and significant redundancy, which make them an excellent target for deduplication. This Technology Brief discusses different approaches to data deduplication in the market today along with the pros and cons of each, and then matches some of the most common backup problems to a recommended deduplication approach. The brief close with a spotlight on Quantum, a vendor whose technology is unique in offering a single solution with multiple concurrent data deduplication modes that can be matched to different workloads. This "policy-based" approach, as Quantum calls it, is a key feature of the company's DXi7500 enterprise disk backup and replication system.