Commentary

Terry Sweeney
 

De-Dupe Do-Si-Do

I'm not sure if you need a dance card or a scorecard to keep track of the pairings in the data deduplication market. One thing's abundantly clear: this storage app must have more commercial appeal than most everything else that's come down the pike lately, given the scramble for partners.

I'm not sure if you need a dance card or a scorecard to keep track of the pairings in the data deduplication market. One thing's abundantly clear: this storage app must have more commercial appeal than most everything else that's come down the pike lately, given the scramble for partners.Just today, for example, EMC added Quantum as a dedupe partner. This, despite an existing OEM deal with FalconStor and having acquired another dedupe vendor, Avamar, more than a year ago.

How EMC layers Quantum into its product line will be interesting to monitor. One report insinuated that EMC had two motives with the Quantum deal: get something sufficiently different from what FalconStor was supplying EMC and its competitors, and, secondly, blunt the momentum enjoyed by another dedupe supplier, Data Domain.


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Hitachi Data Systems has partnered with Diligent, as has tape vendor Overland. Meanwhile, a handful of vendors are using homegrown dedupe technology, like Avnet, BlueArc, and NetApp.

There hasn't been this much do-si-do'ing in storage since the heady days of continuous data protection. But CDP became sort of a dirty word once it became clear how limited the market was for such granular backup. And maybe I'll eat these words, but dedupe has a different feel about it. It offers up some pretty immediate, tangible savings, unlike CDP, which was more of an insurance policy (with a hefty premium).

There are some interesting challenges ahead in the marketplace for dedupe. Is it best suited for primary storage, secondary storage, or both? Is it just an add-on to virtual tape libraries? Will large enterprises start to buy into the dedupe concept more, with their data center strategies and their pocketbooks?

Grab a partner, and watch the dedupe market sort itself out.


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