Although the opportunity for data deduplication and compression on primary storage may be less than for backups, there's ample reason for users to expect significant success in reducing unstructured data such as word processing documents, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

Dave Russell, a research vice president at Gartner, discusses the current techniques for data reduction on primary storage, from standard compression to file- and sub-file deduplication, to a combination of deduplication and compression. He also outlines the emerging approaches that users may find more prevalent in the future.