Primary Storage Optimization

There is now a lot of talk in the industry on Primary Storage Optimization.  I would define Primary Storage Optimization (PSO) as reducing the amount of physical capacity used compared to the amount of actual data in your primary storage.

Techniques used for this include compression, de-duplication, single instancing, etc.  

PSO is tough though.  It is easy to optimize non-primary storage using Storage Capacity Optimization techniques similar to above, but primary storage has different requirements and properties.

First of all you can get more optimization out of backup storage because there is more redundancy.

The PSO solution must run with minimum latency so it doesn't affect the application.  This has been a sticking point.

Who wants to add another point of failure or dynamic to the simple act of reading and writing storage?

There are some solutions out there, mostly software solutions that can do PSO.  To get around the latency I believe some of them do it post processing compared to in real-time.

To me it makes sense to do this on the SAN level.  Pop in an SSM blade and de-duplicate the storage on the network level.  I also think this is the best way to virtualize storage.  They can work hand-in-hand.