Customers absolutely need to make better use of their storage, but as you point out that's not always the only problem. Customers need to stop buying expensive storage, their tier 1 platform that they buy huge amounts of every quarter by rote. The old adage "nobody ever got fired for buying (three letter company)" doesn't hold true anymore. Instead of buying $30/GB high-end SAN, customers need to consider more appropriate places to put their data -- places that are far, far cheaper and also provide superior reliability to purely performance-oriented storage.
One area I'd like to comment on is deduplication. At the backup level dedupe can see savings of up to 50x or more, but that's generally based on doing it wrong -- backing up the same thing time after time. Right now data is being written to primary storage at $30 to $50/GB, and then backed up at an aggregate total cost of maybe $5 to $10/GB more. Deduplicating VTL or backup can shave a few dollars off this, at best.
Instead, much of that data can be moved to an archive tier at $3 to $5/GB, and with an effective cost even lower with deduplication. Effective replication can eliminate the need for backup entirely. This path saves much more money, though isn't as seamless as merely optimizing backup. With economic pressures, any business would be remiss not to look at deploying an effective archive tier.
At Permabit we've developed our Enterprise Archive product specifically to serve these needs, and believe we have developed the only truly scalable deduplication solution for archive data, while also providing levels of data protection far beyond what is available with RAID. I talk a little more about the underlying economics over at my blog in the article at
http://permabit.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/cutting-costs-with-enterprise-archive/Regards,
Jered Floyd
CTO, Permabit
