[EMC employee]
The most recent IDC research on the topic gives Data Domain 64.2% of revenue and more than *half* of all capacity shipped in the purpose built backup appliance (PBBA) market and those numbers have been increasing, not decreasing, over time.
Think about that, out of every Terabyte shipped in the PBBA market more than half of it ships in a Data Domain capacity optimised protection system. And that number is increasing.
Neither Centera nor Atmos (Nor ViPR or Isilon, just to be clear) have ever been part of EMC Backup Recovery Systems. Centera and Atmos are Advanced Software Division products sold by Backup Recovery Systems to support compliance and long term Archiving workloads. I’ve been reading ‘Centera is dead’ articles since 2001 and 12 years on there’s still new hardware and software being released for the product so it’s going to be a while yet before anyone gets to say ‘I told you so’ on any object storage products reaching the end of their market demand.
I'm not going to comment on Isilon's roadmap as that's for them to speak about but I'd see 'merging' Isilon & Atmos as not being on the table. ViPR uses a significant amount of Atmos intellectual property to provide object storage services for EMC, third party and commodity NAS systems. Isilon spoke about their integration plans with ViPR at EMC World.
All the other complaints repeated in the article are a mixture of speculation, opinion and more than a few sour grapes.