Posts by DrDedupe 12 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Dec 2009
Interesting Chris but a bit misleading. EMC revenue includes VMware, documentum, RSA, etc. By the same token I assume that the bulk of Symantec's revenue do not come from storage software. Why not compare revenues from storage products alone? This would be more relevant.
Larry Freeman
NetApp Senior Technologist
"There appears to be no chance of NetApp's mainstream FAS arrays approaching this level of performance"
I really hope this doesn't turn into benchmark-athon. Fact is that NetApp and Isilon offer similar products and both attract customers for the same workloads. My question is: Still no dedupe?? Maverick?? Really?? OK 3 questions...
DrDedupe
StoreOnce is a crown jewel of HP's storage lineup? Lets see, its a very fast VTL with dedupe - just like EMC's, Dell's, Sepaton's and just about every other VTL. Remember - "World's Fastest" is a fleeting term in this industry. But wait - they've also integrated dedupe into HP Data Protector - just like Avamar, Legato, Commvault and a host of others. Ho-hum. Finally, there is the HP idea of integrating dedupe across all storage tiers. Let me be the first to point out to Ms Whitman and Mr Scott that an idea is not a product.
I'd like to think that HP is on the forefront as they claim but the facts speak otherwise.
Larry Freeman aka DrDedupe
Wayne,
You are missing the bigger point. the law of diminishing returns applies to dedupe and scale-out storage. There is no reason to dedupe a PB of data if that PB contains lots of dissimilar objects. Instead, intelligently group objects with similar characteristics and dedupe the groups much more efficiently. Like my Dad used to say, there are two ways to fix a problem, you can use a sledgehammer or use your brain.
DrDedupe
First of all, congrats on your new position Rob-
Next, on the topic of dedupe and scale-out, yes its true that dedupe will not scale infinitely - at some point the return is not worth the investment made in creating billions of metadata hashes with longer and longer lookup times. Anyone promoting global deduplication is likely confusing marketing hype with technical reality.
The solution for scale-out dedupe will be to store similar data in manageable storage volumes. Object-oriented file storage will play an important role here by grouping similar files into common repositories. The probability of finding dupes goes up, and the time to find the dupes goes down. Simple, huh?
DrDedupe
Chris allow me to point out a few things here:
1) "Scaling back" colour and resolution attributes may not be desirable, especially in regulatory and compliance instances.
2) the 5%-10% savings attributed to NetApp dedupe is based on one customer's comment, hardly represents an installed base of tens of thousands of dedupe Users.
3) Penalty-free? Dedupe's value in primary storage is providing reasonable capacity savings without degrading performance. Dissecting files, rescaling, and removing duplicate images, seems like some mighty heavy lifting to me - why no mention of the performance penalty?
Larry Freeman aka DrDedupe
(a NetApp Employee)
@ JL 1
Good comments and good perspective on what's happing with VTL's. As far as NTAP, don't forget a little feature called SnapVault. You could go so far as to say that SnapVault and dedupe combine the best attributes of Inline and Postprocess (and the best of Source and Target dedupe?). I wrote about this a while back...
http://blogs.netapp.com/drdedupe/2008/08/the-great-debat.html
PS full disclosure I am an employee of NTAP
DrDedupe
VTL's are losing steam. According Data Domain guru Frank Slootman "People think Data Domain is a VTL, but 90% of the systems we sell are IP-connected, not with a Fibre Channel protocol. "
NetApp is just following the market, disk-backup is far from dead - but VTL might be...
DrDedupe
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