The Broken Backup Foundation beneath the House that Data Domain Built
The past two weeks have been an extremely exciting time in the storage industry as NetApp and EMC duke it out over the nearly $2 billion house that Data Domain built. On one hand, it's fantastic to see deduplication in the mainstream as it's an excellent technology for reducing data footprints. On the other hand, I think we're missing the point if this high-priced battle leads customers to believe that hardware-based deduplication is the panacea for fixing out-of-control data growth. They deserve more, and it's up to us–the companies responsible for both providing the tools to protect their data and, ironically, for contributing to the proliferation of data copies in itself–to give them a longer-term solution than just another appliance.
Don't get me wrong. I applaud Data Domain's ability to create massive momentum for what has been the best-selling standalone deduplication product on the market. I give both EMC and NetApp credit for recognizing the rising importance of deduplication and I totally understand why they're facing off to add the No. 1 dedupe appliance to their respective arsenals. But I take issue with the implication that this appliance really is the long-term solution for customers. I question where customers will find themselves in six months or even a year from now.
No one should lose sight of the fact that dedupe appliance vendors have been successful because traditional backup and archive companies lacked the foresight and innovation to eliminate redundant data when they created the copies in the first place. (Remember, stand alone dedupe appliances rely on a data feed from legacy backup/archive vendors.) In other words, dedupe appliance vendors essentially built their companies on a foundation of broken backup. Do you really think that if EMC Legato, or EMC Documentum, or even EMC Dantz all had built-in data deduplication, there would be a need for them to make a $2B acquisition? But, then again, deduplicating redundant data probably wasn't that important to EMC when money from IT budgets flowed freely to disk vendors so companies could add more capacity.
Well, times have changed, and the perfect storm of the economic recession, as well as the push by IT to squeeze out inefficiencies and the end of free flowing PO's for disk capacity, put Data Domain in a great market position. That's great for them, and it provides the fastest route for NetApp or EMC to enter this market segment. But I question whether this approach is ultimately the best solution for their customers. It seems to me that customers still are stuck figuring out what to buy and how to make sure all these separate appliances will work together, which will invariably add more data management cost and complexity to already complicated environments.
Our take is that customers must have the freedom to choose the right solution for their environment without fear of hardware vendor lock-in or being stuck with a narrow fix to a broad data management problem. As a point solution, dedupe appliances have done a good job of helping customers slow their back-end data growth, but they can't alleviate broken backup and archiving challenges. Therefore, they can't address ever-increasing amounts of front-end data and this is where the fundamental problem lies.
To do that, you need to go to the source–where data is moved, managed, protected, replicated and archived. By embedding deduplication in software, you can apply data reduction techniques from data creation all the way to the endpoint (yes, including deduplication to tape) to reduce primary front-end data growth, reduce movement over the network and lighten the back-end load. Additionally, deduplication can operate much more efficiently if it functions as part of an overall, holistic data management process with common policies, indexes, management capabilities, encryption and reporting tools built right in.
At CommVault, we recognized there is a better way to solve this customer pain and started more than 24 months ago to build global, block-level dedupe capability right into the data movement software. We delivered this in CommVault® Simpana® 8 software, rounding out our full set of options for enterprise data reduction.
Simply put, we can't find a single situation in which a CommVault Simpana 8 customer ever would need to buy a dedicated dedupe appliance.
This week's announcements from Dell and CommVault demonstrate this further. Together, we have introduced a turnkey, all-in-one disk solution that addresses both the data management and data reduction challenges that customers are facing today. What's so new and different is a solution that addresses these two converging dynamics. Dell PowerVault™ DL2000 Powered by CommVault Simpana 8 software includes all Simpana 8 functionality, which means customers can fix backup, recovery, archiving, replication and deduplication problems with one integrated solution at up to 50 percent less cost than the cost associated with the Data Domain dedupe appliance. In other words, customers get a macro-data management and data reduction solution in one, which is the right solution and the long-term solution. Now, that's truly modern data management.
So, is it time for some of the dedupe appliance hype to be replaced with a more realistic picture of what you can and can't do with a standalone hardware-based approach? Shouldn't we be telling the whole story about deduplication instead of just sticking to the dedupe appliance CliffsNotes? What do you think?
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