The Choice Of Inline Versus Post-Process Deduplication And How It Affects Business Objectives

By Jerome M Wendt, Lead Analyst and President, DCIG Inc.

In the last year or so a number of articles and blogs have appeared on the topic of inline and post-processing deduplication in an attempt to answer the question, "What is the best approach for deduplicating data during disk-based backup?" Unfortunately what these pieces fail to quantify is, "What objectives are enterprise organizations looking to accomplish with disk-based backup and recovery?" The problem this creates is that without first establishing these objectives, it makes it very difficult to arrive at any sort of meaningful conclusion about how to best proceed with deduplication.