"Those who fail to learn from history..."
"...commissioning a report on the effects of de-duplicating the digital universe. Preliminary research indicates that it could shrink by up to 70 per cent,..."
Anyone who has ever worked with large databases *knows* that there is not such thing as an ONF database. For those of you who don't grock, ONF means that the database has no data-replication *anywhere* except for keys (duh).
While ONF is a worthy goal on paper, real life HW constraints means that to get data in decent time, *some* data replication is required. The actual amount of replication varies from DB to DB depending on the needs of the business, but it is *always* there.
Same thing here - some "information" is so retrieval-time-critical that local duplication will be preferable to singularity.