Presentation attended with Datastor – Jeff Raffills and Gary Cullen.
First topic discussed was the concept of data deduplication. The technology has been around for a while but only now is it becoming more of a commercial application. Check out the recent article on the activity of big companies snapping up the IP of those who have been in the game for some time. One company, Data Domain is still standing on it’s own two feet and has recently been granted a US patent for an “Efficient Data Storage System.”
The way I see this technology heading is that tape will be a thing of the past and this was certainly highlighted with some of the other technologies that were presented today. Currently though I doubt there are a large number of companies willing to remove themselves from the tape arena completely. And because this technology is similar to compression, voice and image files won’t compress so well. I do see an opportunity to introduce this technology into companies as an efficient way to storing older, non-critical data and at least get IT managers into the mindset that tape could be removed for 90% of it’s data.
I’m waiting on a presentation file from the suppliers. They had a good visual way of explaining the technology which I will attempt to post up here. The product Datastor talked about specifically was the Data Domain Applicance Series.
