Why would I want tier 1 block based dedupe? Well it doesn't work on unstructured data that well, I mean you might get some dedupe, but who knows how much.
Where it makes crazy money is: VMWare. This isn't specific to VDI. Snapshots and dedupe allow you to quickly backup your VMWare datastores while using almost no storage. It also allows you to put 50 VMs in 100GB of space (well depends on your VMs but that is what I have right now). Normally 50 VMs x 30GB for host OS = 1.5TB of space. Yeah. That makes some sense and cents. You can usually dedupe down to about half the space (but sometimes like similar machines like clones it really works well).
So what is the downside? Well dedupe uses CPU on your netapp, so if your netapp is pegged don't use it. And there is the vol size thing linked above (but that isn't usually a problem). Another interesting thing is you no longer have the data spread across many spindles, which means less IOPS. But there is an interesting fix for that- PAM card. Yup a cache card for the Netapp that keeps those commonly used deduped blocks (that are basically the OS data) in cache and gets you tons of IOPS- only available on 3040 or faster (31xx or 6xxx shipping product). So I've run a pretty good sized storage backend for VMWare off of 1 shelf and a PAM card. If it were a lab, you could even do SATA and PAM card.
This thing is like peanut butter and jelly- ASIS dedupe and VMWare.
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