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Data Domain now says Post-Process is OK

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Written by W. Curtis Preston Wednesday, 20 May 2009 18:24

In a surprise reverse of their longstanding "inline is the ONLY way to go and anyone that does post processing is stupid" position, Data Domain today announced that Post Process is A-OK with them.  Or at least that's how I'm reading the acquisition of Data Domain for $1.5B by NetApp.  Click Read More to see more.

NetApp announced on a concall today that they are acquiring Data Domain for $1.5B.  Nice multiple.  That'll be nice for all the other dedupe players who are waiting for IPO or acquisition.

But I envision some significant changes in future backup school presentations by "A Damnation Tapped."  (That's the best anagram I could find that includes both companies' names.)  ASIS (Advanced Single Instance Storage: dedupe on primary data on a filer) & NetApp's NearStore VTL both do post-process dedupe.  Data Domain does inline dedupe. I can't see "A Damnation Tapped" saying in their sales presentations that post-process is bad.  Therefore, they'll be saying that it's OK, which was the point of my blog entry.  (It made a nice headline anyway.)

Also, I question the long-term viability of the NearStore VTL.  (I don't think ASIS is going anywhere.) Once the acquisition is complete, NetApp will have two products that both backup data at similar speeds and dedupe said data.  One does replication and has no back-end tape, and the other has back-end tape and no replication.  Both limitations can be addressed with a few months of dedupe.  Surely they won't fix the limitations in both.  Surely they won't dump the Data Domain product they just acquired.  So what's left?  The NearStore VTL.  That's where I'm at.  I know that right now there are reasons to choose NearStore VTL over Data Domain, but they can close those gaps with development.  Once they do that, I think that product is going bye-bye.

As to ASIS, it's the only product that is deduping VMware datastores with little or no performance impact -- and it's included with WAFL at no extra charge.  That's going nowhere.  Even if it does nothing but that, it's going nowhere.
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Comments  

 
0 #13 W. Curtis Preston 2009-06-12 17:00
Both companies have told the world with their bids that the product they have isn't meeting their customers' needs. EMC's first generation DL3D product has serious challenges in scalability and restore performance. NetApp's first generation product (for the backup space) doesn't yet have replication or RAID6 and also doesn't scale.

Whoever loses is screwed.
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0 #12 Tom Burrell 2009-06-12 16:49
Not to imply that EMC isn't serious, but for them there isn't much of a downside to a bidding war. Even if NetApp wins, EMC can drive the price up to a point where winning may hurt too much. If EMC wins, then NetApp is damaged in the market, and has trouble with the "our de-dupe is fine" story. In the end, EMC has the pockets to decide exactly what the price is, even if they aren't the ones who pay it. I think they'd be happy to win, but losing hurts them less than it hurts NetApp- and NetApp could be hurt more by winning too.
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0 #11 W. Curtis Preston 2009-06-02 22:22
That's a lot of money just to screw your competitor over.
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0 #10 Nick Cassimatis 2009-06-02 16:18
Quoting W. Curtis Preston:
I highly doubt we'll see DD boxes being sold by IBM. They have their own inline dedupe system.


Curtis - do you see IBM wanting to get into this now that EMC is there, to deny the technology from ending up in "the wrong hands"?
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0 #9 W. Curtis Preston 2009-06-02 12:58
You don't do a $2B move unless you are ready to really buy.
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0 #8 Tom Burrell 2009-06-01 17:53
Now EMC wants to muscle in. Serious play- or are they just trying to make NetApp bleed cash as a competitive move?
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0 #7 W. Curtis Preston 2009-05-29 13:12
No, they don't have clustering, but they do have replication. As to clustering, that will probably go hand-in-hand with their plans for scaling.

I highly doubt we'll see DD boxes being sold by IBM. They have their own inline dedupe system.
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0 #6 Laurence 2009-05-29 04:08
I agree, the aquisition of DD has got to herald the end of the NearStore product. Choice and options for the customer is fine but confusion of the message is a nail in the coffin of any deal. I don't think it will happen though until they have done some dev work on the DD to get that oh so important feature of clustering and replication between boxes.

Another thing netapp may want to work on is getting the DD to actually scale to some useful size for enterprise customers.

In terms of the relationship between IBM and Netapp (which can sometimes be a strange one to understand) I would be interested to see if the DD boxes appear in the Nseries range (currently the NearStore VTL doesn't get OEM'ed by IBM). I am sure all will become clear...
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0 #5 W. Curtis Preston 2009-05-25 15:24
They are two different tools to do different things. ASIS does primary dedupe, and DD does secondary/backup dedupe. Neither does the other well.
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0 #4 David Fartouk 2009-05-25 13:29
I would like to offer another interesting point of view:
Let's say that an inline dedup company builds a very easy to use NAS appliance with a very good dedup ratio, which has snapshots and even fiber connection. Now let's think of a market whose data is exploding and understands the great value of DDUP.
I assume you get my point - ASIS is nice - but DEDUP can be great especially in a VM env.
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