Data de-duplication is the process of examining data to identify and eliminate redundancy. It can have a significant impact on the capacity of data stored, which, in turn, can deliver significant economic benefits.

Data de-duplication is being adopted by companies of all sizes, allowing IT to optimize the capacity of data stored in the backup process-significantly reducing the size of data stores and saving additional investments in disk storage. The popular route to de-duplication has been disk-based backup to "intelligent" disk targets, such as VTLs or NAS storage that employ some form of de-duplication for capacity reduction. These all-in-one hardware solutions are easy-to-implement and are non-disruptive to existing backup processes.