The biggest drama in the 2007-2009 storage industry is over. NetApp loses Data Domain.
This is very bad news for Quantum and FalconSTOR, leaves NetApp in a less than desirable position to market, and puts EMC in a strong technology position. With a capital infusion of 2.3 billion, EMC is going to lead aggressively and move more kit than we can collectively imagine with the Data Domain acquisition.
For Quantum, their main channel was EMC through a not too shabby product line up (if you exclude the Franken-EDL with Deduplication), which extended through the Dell relationship to the mid-market, with a collective wide and deep market reach. That’s going away.
For FalconSTOR, the EMC relationship presumably ends with EDL. EMC still pushes EDL due to the fact it’s a solid product and does a great job at being a non-deduplicated VTL. But nontheless deduplication for backup data storage on disk is usually a deal-maker when you do the capacity sizing and are getting 8:1 deduplication or better.
For NetApp, it’s back to square one with kind of late-to-market VTL+deduplication offering that has yet to even scratch the powerful legacy of the NAS product lineup.
For EMC, things just got a lot more interesting. EMC has acquired arguably the most ‘proven’ deduplication feature set in the field (if you could instances and years in production). While some real engineering will be required for Data Domain deduplication to legitimately play in the primary storage space, the collective deduplication, virtualization, and security capabilities of EMC (Data Domain, VMWARE, RSA), position EMC with a mad toolkit for the cloud storage game. And in the meantime, a simple and proven product offering to market in the small-mid-enterprise market for VTL/NAS deduplication is ready to roll.
Plus, EMC has done a great job of acquiring companies and not screwing them up over the last several years. That is of course if you look past the Data General acquisition and the 2nd-class citizenry of the CLARiiON line, which persists to this day as a result of an ego-driven acquisition. I’d speculate EMC plays somewhat softer and smarter these days, and is going to make this work and take advantage of the investment.
