De-duplication and replication are complements. The more you can de-duplicate, the better and cheaper you can make your replication. If you know your data is hi

De-duplication and replication are complements. The more you can de-duplicate, the better and cheaper you can make your replication. If you know your data is highly redundant (for example, you are backing up all the files on thousands of desktops created with a standard disk image), de-duping will allow you to dramatically improve the replication (perhaps replicated 4x between two data centers nearly in real time, instead of copied to a single RAID-10 array in one data center on a nightly basis). If you don't de-dupe your data before you replicate it, then you end up storing redundant data in a way where the redundancy is totally unhelpful (in fact, hurtful) to you. So, you can look at de-duping as the process of converting hurtful redundancy into helpful redundancy.