Deduplication is certainly a hot topic! I have seen many great discussions about deduplication in many different forums. Many of the discussions center around technical specifications.  Unfortunately, this is not a new phenomenon.  Technical specifications address the applicability of a particular product to a range of uses, sometimes broad but more often narrow in focus.  Deduplication has grown out of many different needs in the industry.  The greatest of these is cost reduction.  Cost reduction in storage, backup, network, and protection (lumping information security with data loss prevention and the like).

Deduplication is dictated by the requirements of the organization, technical bottlenecks, and operating situations. Ideally, you would deduplicate at the source (at the client) and at the target (...