The Final Frontier for Data De-duplication

Bruce asked important questions in his blog entry What happens on the last day?

How many doublings does it take before the cost of storage exceeds the company's annual revenue? I've yet to have anyone give me their plan for 5 years out. What's yours?

Established storage vendors will like customers to keep purchasing storage at the current pace. But, it is only wishful thinking. In my opinion, nothing available currently is the answer or plan, customers want.

I am currently reading an interesting book Dealing with Darwin by Geoffrey Moore. The answer to cost of storage exceeding annual revenue and the 5 year plan lie in this statement from the book.

Competition for the scarce resources of customer purchases creates hunger that stimulates innovation

So, it will be the innovations that will give the solution and the five year plan to storing information without breaking the bank. And in my opinion, the underlying technology to store more with less will be data de-duplication.

It is matter of time before data de-duplication becomes a pervasive technology with in data storage infrastructure and ultimately becoming a key enabler technology in primary storage to store more data in smaller footprint.