IT executives barely have time to keep track of the technology in their own environments; finding the hours in the day to stay abreast of all the new technology solutions in the marketplace is next to impossible. At some point, however, those in the data center corner office are bound to hear about solutions that can deliver near immediate payback and benefit other IT initiatives.

An investment in data deduplication products is easy to rationalize. These products offer benefits to more than just the storage group because they cut data protection capital and operating expenses, facilitate consolidation of distributed backup operations, and slash server virtualization-related storage costs. Data deduplication offerings should, therefore, be on every CIO‟s project short list in 2009.