I suppose that would be cool. If the de-dupe is a software product, that would keep me from locking into a hardware vendor. Nothing like getting a good EMC deal today, and finding out the price goes UP once they are entrenched in my infrastructure.

Dedupe only works on disk for the moment, for the vast majoroty of providers. There's only one I can think of that's doing it to tape, and I'm not 100% satisfied it's going to work effectively.

Coat because I lost my data

This article is a bit misleading as although Symantec already have a totally positive story for the backup of remote offices that doesn't need hardware vendor tie-in, they also already offer deduplication away from the remote office via the PDDO option for Netbackup . Admittedly this is server side de-dup as opposed to client side, but does avoid any client overhead.

What El Reg is talking about is client side de-dup. That will come in NBU and BUE. It might even have come with EMC, but by their desperate actions in trying to buy Data Domain they're clearly saying that their current de-dup technology - Avamar - doesn't cut the mustard, hence them looking elsewhere.

Who does that leave? Commvault? Themselves a potential acquisition target? Tolly Group didn't seem to rate them...

http://www.tolly.com/DocDetail.aspx?DocNumber=209125

http://www.tolly.com/DocDetail.aspx?DocNumber=209123

" Instead of seeing these software products backup data to deduplicating appliances, such as those from EMC, Data Domain or Dell's DL2000 CommVault Simpana box, ..."

Ahh Commvault has been doing this with the implemenation of 8.0. The DL2000 box is simply a prepackaged solution of a server with storage, which uses CommVaults Dedup engine. The others referenced are Hardware Solutions.

If readers want a true discription of what the author is trying to talking about go to Commvault.com