Monday, September 20, 2010

There are several points that make the Xiotech announcement so important. First, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first native block solution to be able to provide deduplication technology. The other primary storage deduplication solutions are file system based, although a few will provide deduplicated services on block storage presented through the file-system, no one that we know of has done this natively on block storage. Second, this gives Xiotech a significant price advantage against its competitors, especially in their sweet spots of server virtualization and desktop virtualization where there is a high opportunity to find redundant data. Xiotech has been especially focused in the virtual desktop space.

Desktop virtualization, as we will cover in our upcoming seminar “Making Sure Desktop Virtualization Won't Break Storage,” provides challenges in two areas. The first is being able to provide consistent performance especially during boot storms. The second area is containing the storage costs as you are replacing inexpensive desktop hard drives with more expensive SAN hard drives. The only way to achieve this second goal is to provide a cost effective solution that has some form of capacity management capabilities. The combination of Permabit Albireo into what Xiotech can already provide in this area could significantly bring costs down and provide them with a key competitive advantage.

For Permabit, who has taken some heat for its claims of “no performance penalty,” this is another case of a vendor known for providing high performance storage systems that has adopted their technology. In both cases, you can bet that these vendors did not make the decision to integrate based on an exciting whiteboard presentation, they must have done some detailed experimentation that backs up the stand we took in our recent blog “What Does ‘No Performance Penalty’ Mean?”.

It also vindicates our claim in an article back in May “Storage Vendors - The Deduplication Stakes Are Raised” that deduplication of primary storage is going to quickly become table stakes for storage vendors wanting to compete in the primary storage market. Within the next six months, you are either going to have to provide deduplication or be functionally eliminated from every storage project. If the storage vendor can deliver primary storage deduplication in that timeframe and do so in a feature competitive way then fine, if not then they are going to have to look to an OEM to provide the capabilities.

George Crump, Senior Analyst