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Data Domain keynote at SNW – Slootman’s surprising response

I attended multiple keynote and breakout sessions at SNW last week, but my busy meeting schedule conflicted with many of the morning sessions. I was able to attend to Data Domain’s talk given by Frank Slootman and wanted to provide some commentary.

The bulk of the session was boring and included what appeared to be a standard corporate slide deck which I am sure any salesperson could present in their sleep.  The presentation could be summarized with Data Domain’s usual message: inline deduplication is good and everything else is bad, and, of course, Data Domain’s deduplication is the best.  I was definitely hoping for something more interesting and was sorely disappointed; however, things changed when it came to the Q&A.

Just to provide a bit of background, my experience with SNW is described here.  There were a large number of end users in attendance both at the expo and the keynote sessions and I estimate that many of the show’s 900 end users were in attendance for this talk.  At the end of the planned remarks, Slootman opened the floor to questions.

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SNW Recap

I returned from SNW in Phoenix last night and wanted to recap the event.  I had 10+ meetings at the show and there were multiple sessions and so am providing my perspectives on the event in general and the sessions I did attend.

Deduplication remains hot and still confuses many
I attended 5 different sessions on deduplication.  The content overlapped quite a bit and yet all but one of them was full.  The presentation in all cases focused primarily on deduplication and data protection.  I heard that there was a great panel discussion on primary storage deduplication which I unfortunately missed. Clearly, primary storage dedupe was not ignored, but it appeared that data protection remained the focus of the dedupe sessions.

Anecdotally, the most common deduplication question related to the difference between target and source deduplication.  It also appeared that deduplication adoption was limited.  When asked who was using some form of deduplication about 50% of the audience raised their hand, but when queried about system size, hands went down rapidly at around 10-15 TB.

The key takeaway is that deduplication remains a strong point of interest.  It appears that end users are still trying to understand the technology and how to implement it on a larger scale.

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Lessons from the Sidekick debacle

The latest scary backup story comes from a firm called Danger that makes the Sidekick PDA/phone. The Sidekick stores the majority of its data in a central data center and the data is loaded each time to the phone is restarted. The idea is that the data center provides protection if you lose your phone. A good idea, right?  Well yes, assuming that Danger adequately protects its customers’ data.

A number of outlets are reporting that Danger suffered a catastrophic data loss and all users’ data has been lost. I checked with a family friend who confirmed that her Sidekick was down for a week and is now finally working as a phone, but her data is inaccessible.  This is unacceptable; Sidekick users paid a monthly fee for this service and Danger should have maintained reasonable precautions to protect their customers data.  Clearly this is a bad situation for everyone, and lessons to be learned by all.

Here are some key takeaways from this event.

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Pondering Fibre Channel over Ethernet

Currently the twittersphere and bloggosphere is actively discussing Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).  The conversation was triggered by a post by Hu Yoshida from HDS, and I wanted to share my thoughts.

One of the most interesting responses was this one by Nigel Poulton where he explains the infrastructure required for FCoE.  He goes into great detail highlighting the lossless nature of FCoE and the required hardware and cabling.  The key takeaway is that FCoE is not iSCSI; it does not use generic 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE) hardware.  You will need different cabling and advanced switches to meet the more stringent demands of FCoE.

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Global Deduplication Explained

W. Curtis Preston recently authored an article on Searchstorage.com.au explaining global deduplication.  This is an important topic which frequently causes confusion.  Curtis does a good job explaining the technology and what it means to end users and  I recommend the article.

A quick summary is that global deduplication means that a common deduplication repository is shared by multiple nodes in a system.  In these environments, a customer can backup their data to any node on a system and it will be deduplicated against related data.  This provides improved ease of use and scalability.

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Deduplication 2.0

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.

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Marketing Odds and Ends

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.

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Streaming LTO-5

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.

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CommVault and Forward Referencing

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.

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Was EMC’s acquisition of Data Domain a sign of desperation?

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?

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