With data deduplication rapidly becoming a standard feature in backup products, storage administrators are looking forward to using the data reduction technology for more of their data. But while non-backup products do support dedupe, technology hurdles must be overcome before it becomes ubiquitous. Data deduplication and compression can help tame data growth and allow companies to spend less on disk, but these technologies are in their early days for primary data. Today, NetApp's FAS arrays can perform post-process, block-level deduplication. EMC Corp.'s Celerra NAS does file-level dedupe. NEC Corp. of America's HydraStor and Permabit Technology Corp.'s Enterprise Archive archiving products added data reduction for long-term repositories, while Data Domain Inc. has positioned its DD Series for use as a nearline or archival device in addition to backup. Some storage pros have begun to visualize a world with dedupe everywhere, but this is still a dream. "Three of the eight people I work with have come to me looking for ways to reduce the amount of data we're keeping online," Tory Skyers, infrastructure engineer at a leading credit card issuer, told SearchStorage.com. The problem, he said, is that none of the products available seem mature enough to be a good risk in a risk-averse climate. "Right now, about the only thing I can offer them is NetApp's V-Series gateway with data deduplication, but it's still a relatively young product for their liking," Skyers said.