IBM announced today that it's bringing data de-duplication to its mainframes through an upgraded gateway appliance that has the ability to compress up to 25TB of tape application data into 1TB of disk space.

Three data storage start-ups have landed more than $US28 million in first-round funding from venture capitalists, a rare feat in an economy that has punished new vendors looking to obtain financing.

Dr Kai Li is a professor at Princeton University and one of the founder fathers of de-duplication vendor, Data Domain, which was the subject of an acquisition battle between rivals, NetApp and EMC (the latter won). He talked to TREVOR CLARKE about the technology and what it takes to create a successful start-up.

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