BANGALORE, INDIA: As with most of the technologies in the marketplace, data deduplication also had its share of initial period of dormancy. 

In the words of Aman Munglani, principal analyst, Gartner,  “In India, dedupe has been around for a couple of odd years now. However, from a marketplace, which has a huge storage customer base, acceptance level is very low.”

Trends say that though for the past few years there have been many takers for data dedupe, adoption level falls short of the expected levels, when compared to other APAC countries.

“In APAC countries, the greatest interest is coming from the more established and mature countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore,” says Sunil Chavan, director, content & file services, Hitachi Data Systems, APAC.

“Organizations in these countries have invested in SANs for the past 10 years, have built up reasonably large storage repositories over this time and also have the skill to implement such technology, so that they have the most to gain from such innovation.”

Munglani further notes that data dedupe is still in its nascent stages in India and the penetration level stands at a mere five-ten per cent today.

However, today these experts see a wave wherein more and more enterprises are opening up to explore this latest hype. 

Why Data deduplication:
“In India, storage repositories are growing, thus requiring innovative dedupe technologies to achieve storage optimization without compromising on performance,” says Chavan. “India is showing a strong interest in data dedupe as organizations face some of the largest storage growth rates in the region and stand to benefit not having to integrate such solutions with legacy infrastructure like some of the established economies.”

Adding to the lot is India's growing telecoms space. With over 450 million mobile phone subscribers and 50 million PC users, India is one of the largest and fastest growing telecoms markets in the world, adding up eight-ten million new subscribers every month. The numbers speak for themselves about India's role in the growing data over metro.

This growth is, however, not restricted to the telecoms sector alone. Of late, BFSI,  manufacturing and IT services, are also witnessing a phase of increased storage requirements. Another trend that is driving more and more takers towards data dedupe is virtual tape library (VTL).

“VTL is basically the target level data dedupe appliance and has a huge scope because there are quite a few environment such as remote office, core banking, ERP, which could be prime target for VTLs,” says Venkatesh Iyer, head - India & SAARC, Backup, Recovery and Archival Solutions, EMC.

Though VTL hasn't touched India in a large scale, it won't be long when there will be a lot of interest for this as well, especially, 'data dedupe on VTL'. “Data dedupe will see increased adoption level in another one, one and a half years,” opines Munglani.