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The article offers the author's insights on the techniques that can help reduce stored-data volume in the U.S. information technology (IT) sector. It states that reducing one's data footprint eases the pressure on networks and backup windows, aside from cutting costs for hardware, software, and data center space. It provides several techniques to reduce data volume which include deduplication, compression, and storage virtualization.

The article features Dispersed Storage software developed by Cleversafe Inc., which divides data into "slices" using mathematical algorithms and dispersed them on a different server across the Internet or within a single data center in the U.S. According to Chris Gladwin, company's CEO, the software provides 99.99% reliability because data can be reconstituted using slices from any six nodes. John Webster, analyst at Illuminata Inc., the approach could completely change the way storage administrators conduct their daily operations.

The article features companies offering products and services for the next-generation data center in the U.S. One of the stronger companies in the segment is Opsware Inc. which has "done a good job in niche market" of server and network configuration and provisioning. Splunk Inc. uses search technology to help information technology managers find the causes of problems from unstructured data. Cassatt Corp. software can create virtualized hardware and software resources running on Linux, Solaris and Windows.