NetApp and Data Domain
by Michael Hay on May 20, 2009
I’m sure that the purchase of Data Domain is well heard now throughout the Internet, and if you have not heard about it yet check out the following search on Google News. I have one really simple question: why?
If they bought the IP and the company for a standalone de-duplication strategy what does this mean for ASIS? I mean to me it seems like a repudiation of that entire strategy because there really weren’t any real benefits — well that is at least one supposition.
If NetApp is planning on creating another island of storage that is another problem in and of itself as the term “namespace sprawl” is a direct comment on the point of loving your first NetApp filer and hating your 10th.
If NetApp is leaving the product alone are they planning a feature like Hitachi already has with HNAS baked into OnTap or some other exotic file system virtualization strategy? We know that NetApp basically copied Hitachi’s approach to block level virtualization in their vSeries line.
Finally, if the plan is to bake Data Domain technology into WAFL as can be witnessed from the Spinnaker purchase it has taken a really long time to get the IP integrated into OnTap as OnTap-GX. To be fair to NetApp here large changes in a product’s file system are easy to talk about and not very easy to do. On average my experience has shown that it can take up to five years for a file system to become mature, and I guess when major changes are added well needless to say it cannot happen over night.
What do you all think about the purchase of Data Domain?
Comments (2 )
Peter on 22 May 2009 at 1:20 am
At first glance, NetApp may now appear to have “duplicate” products since it already offers a free de-duplication solution. But, the dynamics of the marketplace make the arranged marriage of NTAP and Data Domain a must. The reality is threefold: (1) NTAP continues to struggle to penetrate Fortune 50 accounts and requires more product differentiation. Channel checks by Primary Global Research (PGR) indicate that NTAP’s traditional ease-of-use value proposition does not overcome aggressive pricing tactics from EMC. And NTAP’s existing de-dup offering was not helping NTAP to win market share; (2) DDUP’s upcoming primary storage de-duplication offering designed to overcome network traffic problems was not anticipated to perform particularly well. Hence, the company needed the cover of a player that already had decent primary storage device; and (3) The synergy between NTAP and DDUP may help NTAP achieve upside in broad-based storage sales in a manner comparable to IBM’s de-dup acquisition of Diligent. At PGR we believe NTAP had to double down on DDUP just to stay in the game.
Unni Narayanan, Ph.D.
CEO and President
Primary Global Research, LLC
Michael Hay on 22 May 2009 at 3:30 pm
Peter or Unni, how should I address you? The question that I had is more about product integration and alignment. The largest criticism about NetApp is that even their OnTap OS which perfectly integrates at various levels there are scaling problems. NetApp bought Spinnaker to fix this and it has taken 5-6 years to get this baked into OnTap. Market dynamics aside if the DD technology and approach is superior how does the data get from OnTap to DD, replication middleware, StorageX?
