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I was chatting to a potential customer the other day, looking at the pros and cons of de-duplication methods and it’s clear to me that most people still view de-duplication with a bit of trepidation.

While the mechanics of de-duplication are complex, it’s important to understand that de-duplication should be considered as just another process running on the storage system. We trust the storage system to write the data to disk as ones or zeros, that’s rocket science, so surely we can trust the system to get the de-duplication right.

Every year, it seems, is going to be the year iSCSI emerges as a serious threat to the continued dominance of Fibre Channel (FC) as the protocol of choice for Storage Area Networks (SANs). It finally looks as though it may be happening.

The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) is forecasting 50% growth for iSCSI implementations in the USA during the coming year. This is partly, they say, because acceptance by HDS, EMC and IBM has validated the protocol. It is now visible to a wider audience. This is not the full story.