De-dupe's a Stranger to Enterprise Shops

De-duplication may be the rage at storage tradeshows, but there's growing evidence that big enterprise IT pros don't know what it is -- and don't care.

In the recently published Robert W. Baird & Co. "Information Technology Survey," 72 percent of 101 large corporate IT managers reported neither using nor evaluating data de-duplication. Just 5 percent reported actually using it, and another 23 percent are either considering or evaluating it.

According to Baird analyst Daniel Renouard and colleagues: "Most of our participants were not using data deduplication and a fair number did not know what we even meant by deduplication."

This finding tallies with what Sepaton CEO Mike Worhach told Byte and Switch in an interview yesterday: "I think we're still in the hype factor stage with de-dupe for enterprise use. A lot of claims have been made, but in the enterprise space, no one has completed that story yet."

Baird's respondents work for big companies: The median annual revenue per firm was $1.5 billion, employee roster was 7,000, and annual IT budget, $30 million. It's a sector that clearly isn't getting the message that has made Data Domain famous among smaller firms.Of course, Sepaton's CEO is optimistic about changing that. But Baird is, too: "We expect evaluations and general interest in data deduplication to ramp throughout 2008 and 2009 due to vendor marketing campaigns, rapid ROI and the general dislike of tape-based backup/archive," the survey summary states.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.