I’m reminded of the words of the Old Knight in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” about picking the chalice… “Choose wisely”… and what happened to the villain who “chose poorly”.

It just feels like EMC “chose poorly” with Quantum, and they’re paying dearly for doing so, although it’s unlikely that they’ll collapse into dust anytime soon. If they merely drive up the price for DDUP and then let Netapp have it, I agree that EMC will still have to do something different, having tacitly admitted that they have crap for de-dupe right now.

The loser in this bidding war will simply have to do something else, make some kind of major change or acquisition, since they’ve both basically admitted that they have an inferior de-dupe play, regardless how much they hyped it over the past 12-24 months. It doesn’t much matter which way they go, in-line, post-process, or combo, as long as they change it up.

So who’s out there to provide a quick injection of de-dupe secret sauce? Falconstor (which EMC should have just done before, frankly, but having passed once on it, cannot really do now with any credibility), Sepaton, Copan, Symantec’s Puredisk… possibly others.

Copan uses Falconstor through and through (like EMC should have), for VTL and de-dupe functions. So there’s no licensing their secret sauce, it would come down to buying them and replacing existing overlapping products. Possible but ugly for either of them.

Symantec’s Puredisk is its own technology from the ground up, and Symantec has many OEM agreements to show that it is fine with licensing its technology to other players, generally with some kind of non-compete agreement as part of the deal. Puredisk is also very different from other VTL-style de-dupe, but competes well against them. Possible advantageous match here.

Sepaton… to me, this is the obvious play for the loser, although I have no idea what the buy-out price might be, or if it would be worth it. Frankly, Sepaton has a great story, once you get past the “post process” mental block, allowing it to do “wire speed” restore as well as ingest. It scales to huge sizes, and provides better HA and higher speeds than competing solutions. With post-process, you need more disk up front, but that’s the only way you can get the speeds they deliver, both for backups and for restores.

I’d watch for the loser to cast an acquisitive eye on Sepaton, or possibly get in bed with Symantec.

Film at 11…

This raises another point which is that the “loser” will have a hard time claiming technical superiority for their existing solution after haven just aggressively bid for Data Domain.

My point is not that post-processing is better than inline, but that whoever does not get Data Domain may have to align themselves with the post-processing camp as a defense against the winning suitor. After all, if NetApp “wins”, EMC can’t really backtrack and say that their Quantum inline solution is superior; but they could align themselves with FalconStor, for example, and “claim” superiority with post-processing instead.

As you know, many of these technical decisions have little to do with pure technology considerations.

I do not doubt that this war could become more ego driven than business driven; however, I do believe that NetApp has a much stronger business need to acquire Data Domain than EMC. (More in an upcoming post.) Unfortunately, NetApp has much shallower pockets. The “loser” of this bidding war will be put in a tough spot, and I think that NetApp has more to lose than EMC.

I disagree with your characterization of post-process target deduplication. You appear to be positioning inline and post-process deduplication as separate solutions, and suggest that vendors must now look at post-process solutions. This is a common misconception. Customers or vendors need to think about the ability to meet backup windows, recovery time and ROI objectives. It is not simply a question of post-process or inline, but rather how a given solution can meet these requirements. Any entity looking to acquire a deduplication solution is best served to look at these metrics rather than focus on the post-process/inline debate.

I agree that we are living in interesting times!

I am actually more interested in seeing how the “loser” of this bidding war will respsond. It will be very difficult for the loser, whoever it may be, to go back to the status quo and claim convincingly that they have the best inline target based dedeulication solution.

I can see them, particulary if it is EMC that loses out, possibly turning to post-processing target based dedeupe as an alternative. Of course, it is also possible that HP, Hitachi, and other competitors may see post processing as the alternative solution to combat a NetApp/Data Domain or EMC/Data Domain competitor.

In any case, that could make things very interesting for FalconStor or your company, Sepaton. I see many suitors in the horizon.