Dedupe: Let’s look under the hood

Deduplication is a cool technique that some admins use when it comes to saving storage space. No wonder. By deduping, you can gain some extra storage even without deleting anything. Everyone seems to use it, but how does that thing, actually, work? In this article, I’ll look under dedupe hood to understand better its operating principles. Why one may need this? You see, you always can make the most of things once you understand how they work. I believe this principle to apply to almost everything! So, here’s why I examine such a common storage optimization technique as deduplication in this article.

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Shopping for SSDs? Here are several tips to help you make a right choice

These days, if you ask any system administrator something like “what should I do to boost the performance of my I/O-hungry applications?” probably, the most common answer will be “go and get some SSDs”. No wonder, as flash memory becomes more and more affordable while delivering benefits that in the majority of cases outweigh Hard Disk Drives, such as significantly higher performance and better reliability. However, when choosing SSDs, you have to keep a few things in mind since performance, durability, and price vary from model to model.

So what should you ask yourself or a vendor when choosing SSDs?

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