NetApp announced that the deduplication adoption rate among its customers has tripled since November 2007, with more than 3,500 systems and 100 petabytes (PB) of raw storage capacity, solidifying NetApp’s standing in deduplication technology. NetApp now has more than 1,000 customers who have deployed NetApp deduplication across all tiers of data, including primary, backup, and archival data, making it a vendor that offers end-to-end deduplication.

Deduplication technology, which plays an important role in virtualized environments, is gaining traction with customers who struggle with data proliferation and the headaches that are associated with it. Now customers can eliminate redundant data, which improves space and power efficiencies, and reduces the amount of raw storage required. Furthermore, NetApp deduplication strengthens

NetApp's portfolio of space-saving technologies, which also include RAID 6, thin provisioning and flexible clones. Like these other space-saving technologies, NetApp deduplication is a core part of the Data ONTAP operating system, so it is available across the complete FAS family of systems, and all classes of storage. NetApp is the only major storage and data management vendor to embed deduplication technology across its entire line of storage systems.

“There is a definite trend in the market today to virtualize storage environments,” said Heidi Biggar, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Deduplication is just one example. Organizations are embracing deduplication because of the efficiencies it provides their organizations, significantly reducing the amount of physical capacity that must be purchased and managed. By making deduplication available across its storage portfolio via Data ONTAP, NetApp makes it easier for organizations to leverage deduplication throughout their environments. NetApp has clearly become a leader in this space.”

Dexma, a company that creates and hosts mortgage lending software for financial institutions, is a NetApp customer that has leveraged deduplication to help realize greater data storage management capabilities. By combining NetApp and VMware solutions, Dexma has created a virtual environment that enhances storage provisioning and increases Dexma’s ability to scale its storage system to meet its data management needs.

Since the installation of NetApp deduplication in September 2007, Dexma has recovered much of its previously utilized disk space. This has freed up crucial disk space to be used by other applications and has enabled Dexma to efficiently manage its current business-critical data.

“We were able to decrease our storage requirements for our customer file retention by 35%,” said David Waterhouse, senior system administrator, Dexma Inc. “NetApp deduplication provided us with an easy but valuable way of conserving space on our storage systems. This has had a direct effect on our bottom line.”

“Our IBM System Storage N series customers truly value the space and power efficiencies that are provided by deduplication,” said Stephen Grillo, manager, Worldwide N series Marketing at IBM. “Technological advancements in data deduplication across the industry are making this a must-have feature for many of our customers. We know how important features such as virtualization, policy management, and deduplication are to customers, and through our partnership with NetApp we are providing them with a choice of data deduplication technology.”

Deduplication, which is free of charge to customers as an inherent feature in all NetApp storage systems, will also be free when it is extended to NetApp’s Virtual Tape Library (VTL) offering later this year. The deduplication option for NearStore VTL will dramatically reduce the cost of storing backups on disk by providing effective storage capacities that are greater than today’s systems.

In January 2008, Forrester Research cited NetApp as a LEADER in “The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Open Systems Virtual Tape Libraries, Q1 2008” report. Forrester identified NetApp as having one of the strongest product strategies for its NearStore VTL offering. The report, which helps clients make informed decisions when selecting a vendor, evaluates vendors against a comprehensive set of criteria and assesses the state of the enterprise open systems VTL market.

“Deduplication has become a core element of our storage system offerings as more and more customers grapple with data growth proliferation,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing for NetApp. “Deduplication helps our customers control this growth while reducing costs and simplifying data. At the same time, it’s apparent that customers are rethinking their traditional data backup approaches as VTL becomes more prevalent. Through our innovation we will continue to address customer needs, which will include extending deduplication to our VTL offering.”

In addition to VTL deduplication technology, NetApp continues to innovate to maintain its leadership in the open systems VTL market. Recent hardware and software updates introduced in March of 2008 have more than doubled the maximum usable storage capacity of NearStore VTL and increased write-compressed performance by up to 20%, enabling enterprise customers to protect more data in less time with one of the fastest, most scalable products on the market.