File serving to change as we know it

I'm convinced. Deduplication is the way of future pertaining to mass file serving, storage, backups and the like. Dedupe is no longer bleeding edge. As I mentioned earlier, it is a must have for IT. It started out as an option to ditch tape for backups at the block level. Now we are seeing it creep into the file sharing realm in the form of file level dedupe. My company owns 2 of EMC's "unified storage" devices aka Celerras. 2 months ago EMC released a software upgrade that allows for compression AND file level dedupe. Moore's law tells us we have CPU cycles to spare, in most file server's cases. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff, increased CPU processing for more storage capacity. In the end a much more all around efficient solution is realized. In time where services are being offloaded to the cloud and servers are being consolidated and virtualized or all together axed, efficiency is the name of the game.

It won't be long (I predict less than a year) when we'll be seeing more dedupe solutions in the file server space.

Gotta Have IT

It has occurred to me that there are 3 vital game changers out there.
Data deduplication
Virtualization
Wan optimization

All encompass maximizing efficiency.
Data dedupe gives you back 30 to 40 percent of your storage by finding
indentical blocks of data and placing pointers to it rather than writing
full copies of data. So,with file level dedupe, you have 1 copy of
a word document with 5 pointers referncing it rather than 6 full
copies.With block level dedupe, you save 1 version of the text
"thank you"; from every file with additional pointers, rather
than 8 billion strings of that text. It ain't cheap but pays for
itself.

Virtualization.The newest in sliced bread. Remember
mainframes? The more things change, the more they stay the
same Jam a bunch of separate, functional apps in one place
gaining resource, hardware, and operational efficiencies. With an
avg server running at 5% efficiency, this is very wasteful of the
aforementioned resources. The savings can be astronomical
depending on environment.

Wan optimization. This merges many technology concepts to provide
reduced latency and response times across slow links through caching,
compression and other secret sauce. Response times are akin to being on
a LAN.

Coolness comes at cost though. However, long run, all will save
you $.