Storage efficiency is the ability to store and manage data that consumes the least amount of space with little to no impact on performance; resulting in a lower total operational cost.
Efficiency addresses the real-world demands of managing costs, reducing complexity and limiting risk.
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) defines storage efficiency in the SNIA Dictionary as follows: The efficiency of an empty enterprise level system is commonly in the 40–70% range, depending on what combination of RAID, mirroring and other data protection technologies are deployed, and may be even lower for highly redundant remotely mirrored systems.
Deduplication is most efficient at the shared storage layer, however, implementations in software and even databases exist.
The most suitable candidates for deduplication are backup and platform virtualization, because both applications typically produce or use a lot of almost identical copies.
Thin provisioning technology is a technique to prevent under-utilization by sharing the allocated, but not yet utilized capacity.
Customers are facing storage requirements that are growing exponentially and a strong demand for cost-cutting.