Thursday, May 21, 2009

The safest thing for NetApp to do is to leave Data Domain alone, have it be it’s own stand alone company, similar to what EMC did with VMware. Basically NetApp would have to back off of its VTL product line, but other than that this would cause the least disruption and return the quickest ROI on the sale.

However, I don't think that is enough. As our test revealed NetApp has to include compression on primary storage with its deduplication capabilities to get maximum efficiency. The Data Domain technology can do that, now implementing that inline into the file system is going to be a challenge. While this is no small task it can be done especially since no one knows the NetApp file system as well as they do. Doing so could give them a zero performance impact compression and deduplication, no small feat.

The other challenge and weakness that we pointed out is data movement; moving data from point A to point B, transparently. Even if they can integrate Data Domain's technology inline so they can dedupe and compress with no performance impact, (again that's a big request), at some point users are going to want to move data to a different tier of storage, possibly a power managed or a compliant archive tier like those offered by Nexsan and Permabit. 

The ability to control what gets compressed and deduped and where the resulting data is stored becomes more important if NetApp can't pull off a zero impact inline optimization integration of the Data Domain technology.

We know that Ocarina can dedupe post process and move the resulting optimized data to any tier and manufacturer of storage, we know that Storwize can compress inline with little to no performance impact, but it remains to be seen if NetApp can or even tries to do both, and while they can support a limited number of other types of storage with their V-Series they have yet to master transparent data moves between classes of storage.

The net is that this deal seems like a good one for both parties. Now it comes down to what does NetApp do with it. The backup focus is obvious on primary storage optimization, while they do interesting stuff with VMware images, they have some work to do for either active optimization (databases) or near active data optimization (files) and for now users have real products that solve the problem today to choose from.