Data reduction in primary storage (DRIPS!)

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Although it’s become a staple of backup systems, data reduction is still just beginning to appear in primary storage systems. Here’s how it works and who’s doing it.

The demand for more data storage capacity at most companies continues to grow at eye-watering rates, in some cases as high as 100% each year. And even though the cost per terabyte of storage is dropping, the net effect is one of increasing costs.

Within the secondary storage market we’ve seen vendors tackling growth by implementing technologies such as data deduplication and compression. For those data types, the use of

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space-reduction technologies dramatically shrink the amount of real storage required and can significantly decrease costs. However, in the primary storage market we haven’t seen a widespread deployment of similar space-saving techniques. Data reduction in primary storage (DRIPS) is in its infancy, but we’re starting to see these features being added to products from the big storage vendors. Let’s take a look at the state of the DRIPS marketplace: why space reduction can be useful, how much money you can expect to save and the potential downsides of any implementations.

This was first published in October 2012

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