Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Free/Open Deduplication Software?
First time accepted submitter ltjohhed writes "We've been using deduplication products, for backup purposes, at my company for a couple of years now (DataDomain, NetApp etc). Although they've fully satisfied the customer needs in terms of functionality, they don't come across cheap — whatever the brand. So we went looking for some free dedup software. OpenSolaris, using ZFS dedup, was there first that came to mind, but OpenSolaris' future doesn't look all that bright. Another possibility might be utilizing LessFS, if it's fully ready. What are the slashdotters favourite dedup flavour? Is there any free dedup software out there that is ready for customer deployment?" Possibly helpful is this article about SDFS, which seems to be along the right lines; the changelog appears stagnant, though, although there's some active discussion.
The most likely answer is when some one is willing to pay for it. What you have described above isn't a trivial effort and it's unlikely someone is going to do the work for free so it will have to wait until someone is willing to pay for the development. Even then it's likely that the developer may keep it closed source in order to recoup the investment.
And now, even the next version of Windows Server will contain integrated data deduplication technology! [...] The most interesting thing is that Microsoft Research says it doesn't affect performance almost at all.
Well ask anyone who lost documents on DoubleSpace volumes or got corrupted media files on Windows Home Server and they will tell you that even if Microsoft Research says so, it's not something I would put on my production servers any time soon.
lucm, indeed.
Microsoft has a looooong history of promising features for NTFS and then not delivering on them.
Also, perhaps the reason that Linux does not support file-system compression on the fly is because it's a horrid idea, and should never actually be used?
This has got to be some sort of smear campaign against Microsoft, because I cannot believe that they would think that bludgeoning people with astro-turf is going to get them sales. The first two articles with MS shilling I saw (today!) I wrote off as just people sharing interesting stuff that happened to come from MS, but thanks to your over-heavy hand, the pattern is clear as a bell now.
So tell me MS marketing people, are you seriously this incompetent, or did a new astro-turf campagin incentive get out of hand? I'm honestly curious how this happened.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Heh, the comment is completely on topic, interesting and factual and yet we still have fucktards insisting that any mention of MS must have been paid for.
Get a life.