I was recently pondering TSM’s implementation of target deduplication and decided to review ESG’s Lab Validation report on IBM TSM 6.1. There is quite a bit of good information in the paper, and some really interesting data about TSM’s target deduplication.
Before discussing the results, it is important to understand the testing methodology. Enterprise Strategy Group clearly states that the article was based on “hands-on testing [in IBM’s Tucson, AZ labs], audits of IBM test environments, and detailed discussions with IBM TSM experts.” (page 5) This means that IBM installed and configured the environment and allowed ESG to test the systems and review the results. Clearly, IBM engineers are experts in TSM and so you would assume that any systems provided would be optimally configured for performance and deduplication. The results experienced by ESG are likely the best case scenario since the average customer may not have the flexibility (or knowledge) to configure a similar system. This is not a problem, per se, but readers should keep this in mind.