Jul 01

Data Domain & EMC & NetApp – Protest Takeover or Manly Courting?

Enterprise Technology 2 Comments »

NetApp initial attempt to acquire Data Domain shocked most people in the market. Insiders tell me even at highest levels in Data Domain and NetApp engineering, no one had any inkling the boards were inking contracts. That makes a lot of sense with years of blood-war between both companies and EMC. So when EMC finally did find out, the results were awkward and hostile. Never a good combination, but it’s a great way to keep the PR firms busy.

In addition to the dramatic overtures by Joe Tucci in the aggressive courting of Data Domain, with all-cash offers, on top of the cool 100M antes to the original offer, and even bigger cash offers, you start to wonder if this is love or desperation at work? And in the end, Data Domain still holds out for the fiscally less enticing, yet rumored to be contractually binding marriage to NetApp.

What does this signify?

Validation of Data Domain, and the first big move to commoditize the duplication market. Sure, deduplication is a feature applied to primary and secondary disk architectures, but the bigger story is how deduplication is part of the gateway to the next big wave of IT infrastructure. Right now deduplication is fragmented and promoted by vendors all with their own secret sauce. Everyone is special. Everyone is different. In the future, you’ll be buying this feature set from 1 of a handful of market leaders. Same old story for a very disruptive technology feature.

Tucci doth protest too much?

The EMC story for deduplication is fragmented. You have a stalled relationship with FalconSTOR, after mammoth generation-1 VTL deployments from 2003 on, yet no adoption of FalconSTOR deduplication software. You next have Avamar, which is a separate platform specifically engineered for backup. Then you have Centera (which is not performing deduplication, but single-instance store of file objects, with industry rumors the platform is approaching end of development/life. Overall there is a boat-load of non-deduplicated kit spread around the world and no smooth transition for legacy customers.

Then there was about 12 months of EMC telling customers deduplication is ‘in development. Next you have the Quantum partnership, which is in pole position for EMC deduplication / VTL offerings. Finally you have the hostile bid to take over Data Domain. This doesn’t exactly send the good vibes to Quantum, even if you are the CEO .

EMC can spin just about anything out of ether, but my take is they desperately need a new technology base for deduplication and this is much more than picking up market share in the mid-market. EMC knows market share and can market any thing, any where. We all know that. And if you look at other major EMC acquisitions (such as RSA, VMware, etc.), none of these moves were marriages of convenience. EMC is playing strategically and working to fill a technology gap. Even though they have quite a few varations on the deduplication theme, there’s still a gap.

Will the Data Domain & NetApp love last?

You never really know, but my personal theory is this is a mix of practical business sense and high-level hatred of EMC. Quite a few of Data Domain’s original crew came from NetApp. The culture of strong product engineering and R&D are pervasive.  Sure, Data Domain reminds me of EMC too , but who can blame a publicly traded company who IPO’s, as we careened into worldwide economic meltdown 2008, for being aggressive. The NetApp deduplication / VTL offering was late to market and in spite of the company reputation for making outstanding and easy to use products, late in this game means you loose. Plus, an injection of aggressive won’t hurt NetApp’s position in the backup infrastructure market.

The most promising aspect is that big company R&D budgeting, strong synergy in engineering disciplines, and the cornering of the NAS primary and secondary storage market will drive out price and flatten the market for deduplicated disk. NetApp already has deduplication in production for NAS filers, now they’re gaining thousands of clients and a proven architecture for backup infrastructure. Plus, this may help Data Domain scale out of 35 usable TB per instance faster than planned.

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Jun 25

Why This, Why Now?

Industry No Comments »

The mission?

To research, spot, and explore trends and their real world impact as they apply to the next generation of IT infrastructure and enterprise computing.phase shift

Why this blog?

Because there aren’t many independents covering this space in a holistic way. Plenty of ‘company blogs’ but not so many IT infrastructure people. There are plenty of niche bloggers and evangelists who are super deep in various specialities, such as virtualization, storage, deduplication, data protection, and cloud, but few who are looking at the wholesale change underway for IT infrastructure. At first I thought I was late to the party but upon further inquiry realized the party is just starting…

why now?

There’s a lot of hype in IT, it keeps the spending and budgeting up.

Cloud is hype city without a whole lot of focus or clarity yet. I just look at the vast inefficiencies in classic IT infrastructure versus the radically innovative core infrastructures of Amazon, Google, etc and think the cloud gateway to these architectures will crush IT as we know it for some data types, some types of companies, in many different situations. Labor arbitrage for enterprise infrastructure management could become irrelevant over time if next generation architectures flatten out skill requirements.  Why now? It’s timing.

WAN Network architectures are fatter and cheaper. Cheap petabyte scale infrastructures are do-able and you don’t necessarily have to hack together custom built gear and code to make it work. And most importantly you have base of technologies for virtualization, grid, deduplication, all rapidly becoming commoditized, and now cloud emerging as the gateway to super efficient architecture. This is more than just the next wave of Moore’s law and new feature sets or gadget buzz. This is a phase shift.

Why should people read it?

To keep up, to contribute, to challenge ideas, to address a plethora of good questions. Because the whole idea we are used to and for many of us the basic paradigm of distributed computing “as we learned it” and is staple to our entire careers, may in fact be changing. Were talking about 20 years of one model and entering into the next 20 years of the new new new thing. And the practical impacts to us, well that’s really yet to be seen but it’s a fair bet certain roles, functions, and technologies will begin to disappear in the next 5 years as we shift gears into the next 20 year cycle of IT infrastructure.

Who should read it?

Technologists, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, strategists, designers, scientists, researchers, and thinkers who share a common curiosity of what is going to happen to IT infrastructure as we know it.

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Jun 14

Phase Shift

Industry No Comments »

In this market, we are seeing striking change not only in customer behavior, but in the global competitive landscape for enterprise technologies and services. Recently this dawned on me: the IT infrastructure market is changing faster than we may know. A severe market downtown, survival driven customer behavior, increased global competition, and multiple disruptive technologies hitting the scene simultaneously,  all pointing to a fundamental shift in our game.  My position?

Traditional IT services methods for selling and delivering will quickly become a thing of the past, and to compete and grow in the market, innovation and measured-risk are prerequisites.

The coalescence of virtualization, deduplication, cloud infrastructure, and maturing WAN architectures is collective game changer. The whole idea of customer data sitting in the data center forever is going to change.  For now, companies are taking these technologies on one by one, but it’s not long until the combined force of these will yield truly innovative products and services.

This blog is about what we do to evolve our methods, and in doing so keep up with a big shift in underlying infrastructure technologies.

Open kimono, and why be paranoid about divulging good ideas, when you might receive good ideas in return?

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