Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Consider open source deduplication

May 18, 2010 – Some vendors (e.g., NetApp, EMC) give away data reduction (aka capacity optimization) technology, while other solutions for compression and data deduplication can get pretty expensive pretty quick. There’s another alternative: open source deduplication.

Vendors/organizations offering open source deduplication range from Oracle/Sun to Bacula, Nexenta and Zmanda to newcomer Opendedup.

I’m not very familiar with these products, but I recently read an article on open source deduplication on InfoStor sister site Enterprise Storage Forum.

Here are some quotes from some developers/execs involved with open source deduplication:

Opendedup developer Sam Silverberg: “SDFS has performance, scalability and cost advantages over many proprietary solutions, but I think proprietary solutions have some real technical benefits. Replication, source-based deduplication, and 24/7 phone support are not available today in open source solutions.”

Kern Sibbald, founder of Bacula.org and CTO of Bacula Systems: “Proprietary solutions are expensive and the source code is not available, so it is not easy to check or compare their performance. From the deduplication statistics that I have seen from proprietary vendors and those given by open source projects . . . I would say that the open source solutions stack up very well against the proprietary solutions.”

Chander Kant, CEO of Zmanda: “Over time, deduplication will become standard. Just like we have standard algorithms for compression today, there will be standard algorithms and formats for deduplication. And open source shines with standardization. So the future of deduplication is squarely with open source.”

Since I’m not familiar with these open source solutions, I don’t have an opinion (although I sincerely doubt that “the future of deduplication is squarely with open source.”) Then again, although the article doesn’t provide stats, it appears as though a lot of users are downloading this free code.

Read the full story on Enterprise Storage Forum: “Open Source Deduplication: Ready for Enterprises?”

Data deduplication news from InfoStor:
Quantum adds SMB mode to data deduplication lineup
Infineta unveils deduplication for inter-data-center traffic
EMC debuts Data Domain Global Deduplication Array

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