The folks over at the Online Storage Optimization blog recently wrote a post entitled Get Ready for Dedupe 2.0 where they outline their vision for the future of deduplication. I read the post and was amazed at the similarity between their views and SEPATON’s core VTL architecture. I thought that it would be useful to address each of their points and indicate how they apply to SEPATON’s DeltaScale Architecture.
It has been a particularly busy week here at SEPATON HQ with limited blogging time. Instead of a technology oriented post, I thought that I would highlight some marketing items from this week.
Upcoming speaking event
I will be speaking at the Storage Decisions Deduplication Seminar this Tuesday, 8/25 in Hartford, CT. This free event is open to end users and W. Curtis Preston will be speaking as well. If you are in the area, visit this URL for registration and location information.
University of New Hampshire press release and case study
SEPATON issued a press release on August 19 highlighting UNH and their deployment of an S2100-ES2 with DeltaStor technology. UNH is an example of a customer who experienced the challenges with physical tape that I addressed in Streaming LTO-5 and The Fallacy of Faster Tape. The customer struggled to stream his tape drives and did not want to multiplex because of the impact on recovery times. The SEPATON solution enabled him to dramatically accelerate backups and recoveries and prevented shoe-shining. Download the case study to read more.
InfoStor article
InfoStor recently posted openBench Lab’s review of SEPATON’s S2100-ES2 with DeltaStor deduplication. openBench tested an S2100-ES2 and DeltaStor with virtual server backups and provide a detailed analysis of the performance and reduction ratios. The full report will be available on our website shortly and I will update this post with a link when available.
Chris Mellor (twitter:@Chris_Mellor) recently posted an article over at The Register about LTO-5 entitled Is LTO-5 the last harrah for tape?. He makes an interesting point about the future of LTO and whether LTO-5 will be the last generation of the technology. Most of the comments on the article disagree with Chris’s opinion.
I believe that there is another major issue with LTO-5 that must be addressed. The challenge with LTO (and most other tape technologies) is its limited ability to throttle performance. Users must carefully manage their environment to ensure that they stream their drives or else backup performance will decline dramatically. As drives become faster, the challenge of optimizing your environment for the technology becomes more difficult. You can read more about this in my blog post entitled The Fallacy of Faster Tape.
I was recently reading this document from CommVault that highlights their deduplication technology and was surprised by their use of the term “forward referencing”. Forward referencing is a common term in deduplication with a generally agreed upon definition. CommVault appears to have redefined the word and promoted their version as a feature. This is confusing and possibly misleading because a reader might not realize that the definition of “forward referencing” in this document is completely different from the one everywhere else in the industry.
A blogger over at Seeking Alpha makes this case. He argues that EMC must make acquisitions for growth and that the excessive price paid for Data Domain deal is a sign of desperation.
To summarize the post, the author suggests that the growth in EMC’s core storage business is slowing and that they must look for ways to accelerate growth. The blogger believes that EMC will pursue an M&A strategy to remedy the situation and thinks that the Data Domain acquisition is a sign of desperation because of the excessively high price paid and the limited revenue and profit contribution. The author illustrates his point with numerous charts and graphs.
What do you think?