EMC Corp. announced at the Storage Networking World (SNW) show in
Florida today that it will purchase data deduplication backup
company Avamar Technologies Inc. for $165 million -- yet another
acquisition and within days of CEO Joe Tucci promising a slowdown
in the company's buying spree.
Avamar makes a disk-based backup product called the Axiom. It is
best known for its hash-based commonality factoring software that
identifies similar data from multiple clients over many backups and
only stores one copy, making more efficient use of storage space
and reducing backup time. The hash is the result of applying an
algorithm to some data to derive a unique number. It's extremely
unlikely that any two files would produce the same hash result.
Users said it takes approximately three weeks of running backups
before true returns can be seen. Avamar has approximately 400
customers, according to EMC.
"This is my favorite acquisition of October," joked Mark Lewis,
executive vice president and chief development officer at EMC,
during a dinner with press and analysts Tuesday night. EMC plans to
add Avamar's technology to its backup products, namely Legato
Networker, and its Clariion Disk Library virtual tape product, but
no timeline was given for the integration. Lewis' comment touched
on a sensitive topic among industry analysts. EMC users, who have
watched the company spend billions of dollars in the past few
years, are still waiting for it to integrate the pieces in a
meaningful way. Infoscape, EMC's new data classification tool that
pulls together components from its acquisitions of Legato,
Documentum and Smarts, was the first significant step in this
direction taken a month ago.
"We can see in our research [talking to end users] that there's
an impact, because people are concerned that they've bought too
much. EMC will have to watch very carefully how they set
expectations about all these acquisitions [for users]," said Robert
L. Stevenson, managing director of TheInfoPro's storage research.
On the other hand, he said "If these acquisitions are strengthening
their product roadmap, some users could actually feel better about
investing in EMC, knowing how much they're putting into development
toward the future."
Phil Goodwin, president and a founder of Diogenes Analytical
Laboratories Inc., noted that data deduplication technology goes
against EMC's hardware business once and for all --as it means less
disk.
"It's creative destruction in a sense -- they eventually will
have to destroy some of their own business in a way, especially if
they combine this with Symmetrix or Clariion. But companies that
can do that in the long run will come out on top."
Stevenson added that the race is now on between Network
Appliance Inc. (NetApp) and EMC to integrate deduplication into
their core products. Both have the technology, "but if they [EMC]
can get it integrated with Celerra, that puts pressure on NetApp,"
he said. Another company making waves in the deduplication field is
Data Domain Inc., which recently launched its data center
deduplication storage array, dubbed the DDX.