What’s the Difference Between Compression, Deduplication, and Single-Instance Storage?

Compression is old news, but it’s still relevant. Single-instance storage seems to have come and gone. Then there’s data deduplication. So what’s the difference?

Here’s my own piece from the IBM Storage Community blog comparing the three.

When I talk about the various state-of-the-art capacity optimization solutions that are now appearing in the market, the same comment usually arises: “Isn’t this the same as zip?” Or a long-tenured storage pro will remind me that, “Stacker died out a long time ago, so why is this any different?”