Increasing demand by IT buyers for greater storage efficiencies will drive adoption of deduplication solutions over the next 12 months. According to industry analysts at IDC, over 60 percent of respondents are either in the process of deduplicating or have plans to deduplicate their primary, backup, or archive data in the coming year.

Respondents had to be investigating, evaluating, or using some form of deduplication to be included in the survey.

"The tipping point for spending on deduplication solutions stems from larger projects around improving storage performance, virtualizing servers, and disaster recovery," said Laura Dubois, program director, Storage Software. "The importance of deduplication and the opportunities it presents were validated by the public bidding war waged in 2009 between EMC and NetApp for deduplication heavyweight, Data Domain."

Firms with more than 6 petabytes (PB) of total disk storage place higher priority on storage performance as a driver, and 57.5% of survey respondents said their organizations are currently implementing deduplication or have already deduplicated primary data including virtual servers. Overall, deduplication usage and plans are comparable for backup and primary data, and only slightly lower for archive data. Additionally, users' satisfaction with deduplication technology is highest in the areas of performance, overall system, and management.

Other key findings from the IDC survey include the following:

• Areas for deduplication improvement include implementation, ROI, and vendor commitments
• EMC (including Data Domain) and NetApp dominate hardware-based deduplication
• EMC, Symantec, and IBM dominate software-based deduplication
• 32.4% of respondents were able to or will eliminate tape as a result of dedupe with 59% of respondents citing they have or will reduce tape
• Dedupe for backup shows greatest opportunity for firms with 5,000-9,999 employees and 6-49 PB of disk storage.

About This Study

Complete survey results can be found in IDC's special study, Deduplication: An End-User Benchmark on Adoption and Value Metrics. This Web-based survey of 501 U.S. businesses (100+ employees) was completed in October 2009. Respondents had to have an IT-related role and be involved in the purchasing decisions for (or manage) storage products. Respondents also had to have an understanding of deduplication and be in one of the stages (currently investigating, already investigated, implementing, currently using) of deduplication adoption.

About IDC

IDC is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make fact-based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,000 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. For more than 46 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company.

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