Storagezilla makes a brief mention of a new EMC acquisition called FastScale. My (even briefer) coverage of it is that it’s a technology that enables deduplication of deployed operating systems in cloud based environments.
Now, remembering that I’m yet to be convinced on the entire cloud meme, I can still appreciate this level of technology even if I don’t particularly appreciate the field it’s for. The reason I think this is smart technology is because ultimately all storage does need to move towards deduplication. However, it’s clear that to achieve this, there needs to be a consensus reached – there needs to be a unified protocol and standard for deduplicating and handling deduplicated data; that way, it can be handled seamlessly throughout the entire ILM and ILP process, regardless of which technologies work with it. I.e., just as we have SCSI standards, iSCSI standards, TCP/IP standards, etc., we need dedupe standards.
Once we reach that point (and I think it’s a “long” way off, in IT terms), we’ll see true cost savings: deduplicated storage, deduplicated archive, deduplicated backup, all working with single instances of data with no wasted storage, archive or backup media, regardless of which vendor is slotted in where.
