Dedupe is the new virtualization. Lots of hot air and talk of saving loads of money but then the large firms with real data centers look at the caveats and run away.
From my personal experience in the last 5 years:
Investment bank2: Dedupe sounds great! We can massively reduce our tape overhead
Vendor: Yeah, but you'll wanna back up to disk to take proper advantage of it. Tape is dead, get with the times.
Investment bank2: What about bandwidth? I've got 25 tape drives that do 70Mb/s? Can your disk solution do that?
Vendor: You won't be writing as much cos of the dedupe. But we're confident you'll see good bandwidth.
Investment bank2: But 1 Tb of your RAID is 23,000 notes. A 1Tb hcart2 tape which generally manages1.6 - 2Tb with the drive compression is 35 quid. What about all our backup servers that are in different subnets? Can we connect all of them to the same disk like we do with tapes and then manage it with scsi reserve? Or do we need to predict how much storage each media server will need and carve the array up? And how do we offsite?
A chap from IBM said to my boss the other day that dedupe is a bit like teenage sex.
Lots of people are talking about it.
Lots of people that say they are doing it actually aren't.
Those that are doing it, aren't doing it well