The down and dirty on data deduplication

Product Test and Buyer's Guide This newsletter is sponsored by Orchestria Mitigating Business Risk with Intelligent Electronic Control Download this free analyst whitepaper that explores the ever growing inherent risks associated with control free electronic actions, including message, web and file activity. This insightful paper discusses the landscape of the problem and provides recommendations for mitigating the business risks associated with control free electronic action. Product Test and Buyer's Guide, 07/24/07 By Logan Harbaugh At its core, data deduplication is a simple concept. Stored data is parsed for duplicate sequences, and when duplicates are found, a pointer to the first instance is inserted in place of the duplicated data. For example, using a product that supports data deduplication, a backup of an Exchange server in which 20 recipients have received the same attachment would store only the first instance of that attachment with all others pointing back to it. Under this scheme, the many parts of different files that are similar need to be stored only once. For instance, if the first few lines of a document contain the path name of the document, that name will be generally the same for all the documents in a folder. Optimize Your WAN: Network World Shows You How In this Executive Guide learn how optimization can supercharge your WAN. Click Here If the path name is 40 characters long, and the first 29 are the same for all of the files, the 29 bytes in all of those files after the first one are replaced with a pointer. Because many types of files have structural elements that are similar from file to file, and PowerPoint or PDF documents may contain the same text as the original Word document, the same strings of text recur in many documents. For more on this test, please click here.

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Contact the author: Harbaugh is a freelance writer and IT consultant in Redding, Calif. He can be reached at logan@lharba.com. This newsletter is sponsored by Orchestria Mitigating Business Risk with Intelligent Electronic Control Download this free analyst whitepaper that explores the ever growing inherent risks associated with control free electronic actions, including message, web and file activity. This insightful paper discusses the landscape of the problem and provides recommendations for mitigating the business risks associated with control free electronic action. BONUS FEATURE IT PRODUCT RESEARCH AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Get detailed information on thousands of products, conduct side-by-side comparisons and read product test and review results with Network World’s IT Buyer’s Guides. Find the best solution faster than ever with over 100 distinct categories across the security, storage, management, wireless, infrastructure and convergence markets. Click here for details. PRINT SUBSCRIPTIONS AVAILABLE You've got the technology snapshot of your choice delivered to your inbox each day. Extend your knowledge with a print subscription to the Network World newsweekly, Apply here today. International subscribers, click here. SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES To subscribe or unsubscribe to any Network World newsletter, change your e-mail address or contact us, click here. This message was sent to: security.world@gmail.com. Please use this address when modifying your subscription. Advertising information: Write to Associate Publisher Online Susan Cardoza Network World, Inc., 118 Turnpike Road, Southborough, MA 01772 Copyright Network World, Inc., 2007