HP's storage arm moved to establish a presence in the deduplication market today when it announced it was integrating the technology into new systems aimed at the SMB market, and existing systems in the enterprise market.

HP's StorageWorks business director Adam Thew said, "we're putting de-duplication into our virtual tape products. Data managers want to reduce costs by consolidating storage, retaining more data online, and all in a package that's easy to deploy and simple to manage."

For SMBs and enterprise remote offices, HP has launched new systems in its D2D Backup System appliance range, the HP D2D 2500 and 4000, which it said uses technology developed internally at HP Labs, called Dynamic De-duplication. For enterprises HP is putting 'Accelerated De-duplication' into its StorageWorks Virtual Library Systems (VLS).

"VLS is targeted at enterprise datacentres, for firms going from storage capacities in the terabyte range to the petabyte range, and having extreme pressure from an operational perspective," said Thew, adding, "here de-duplication happens after the backup is completed – you land your first backup on the system, then de-duplicate."

Data deduplication reduces file storage by taking out duplicate file copies or data at the disk block level, which can mean a significant reduction in file storage requirements, and faster restores from backup. The HP systems launched today can give a 50:1 reduction ratio, said Thew, adding, "in the future, support will be added to allow customers to take advantage of low bandwidth replication between systems."