BANGALORE, INDIA: Of late, we have been hearing a lot about how data, especially unstructured data, are sprawling over the metro and how storage and networking experts are digging out newer ways to manage this.

Recently I have been to an HP POD (Performance Optimised Datacentre) event where HP showcased its 20-foot POD, built on the data centre in a shipping container concept. The POD can support over 1,500 compute nodes, 100 physical servers per rack, has an average power density of 27 KW per rack, where the maximum density can go up to 34 KW, which is much much higher than what a traditional data centre can provide, and that too in a smaller space.

It seems like the storage industry is set to brave the data growth storm and is waiting for the right wind to blow to go further and plan out how to curb and manage data more efficiently.

That went a bit off the topic, however, containing the growth of data is a common thread that I was trying to arrive at. Now coming to the point, experts have been trying their hands successfully at various data management technologies such as thin provisioning, storage tiering, e-mail or database archiving, data deduplication etc. to contain data, over the past few years.

Let's here take a look at the data dedupe concept. Though I have dealt with the topic before, let's see how data dedupe will suit the virtual environment.