An article in SearchSMBStorage reviews data reduction as one of the key components of NAS management. The article includes an interview with Brian Wolfinger of LDiscovery, an E-discovery firm with 250TB of BlueArc NAS storage:

..."In the DAS world, we had a very straightforward methodology for storage management: If you ran out, you bought more. With the cost of NAS, there is definitely a point of diminishing returns so that strategy doesn't work. We couldn't just continue to add storage when we exceeded our storage pools," said Brian Wolfinger, vice president of electronic discovery and digital forensics at LDiscovery

He added that the world of e-discovery, even at his almost 100-employee company, rivals that of video editing in terms of data storage needs. "We create an archive of evidence -- documents, images, and databases -- for massive criminal and civil litigation." LDiscovery uses the NAS devices as a holding pen for client data while it is processed and formatted for e-discovery.

To ensure these sensitive tasks would not be compromised by degrading performance on overloaded NAS devices, Wolfinger deployed software from Ocarina Networks. The Ocarina EcoSystem integrates with the firm's BlueArc Corp. Mercury devices and includes an appliance, data management software and data compression tools...

"In the first two weeks it was deployed, we saved 8 TB of space and in the first month we saw a 72% rate of compression. We were only looking for 20% to 40% to regain the cost of the tool, so going that far over was unbelievable," he said. He credits the deduplication [data reduction] for a lot of that reduction. "In our industry, there is a high rate of duplication, so to manage that and eliminate it saves a lot of heartache," he said...

Read the entire post.