As more and more users deploy data deduplication in secondary
storage, competition among vendors in the market is growing
intense.
Executives from dedupe players Avamar Technologies Inc., which
was acquired by EMC last October for $165 million, and Diligent
Technologies hit the road recently to meet with media and
analysts, and make their stance known on the major debates
surrounding this technology.
There's little these two players agree on, in the end, except
that the competition is passionate. "It's difficult to have a 30
second elevator pitch in this market," said Jedidiah Yueh, founder
of Avamar and currently a vice president of product management
within EMC. "The technologies can be very different between
competitors, but you have to peel back a few layers of the onion
before you can really start to see it."
"There's a lot of fertile ground here," said Neville Yates,
chief technology officer (CTO) for Diligent. "There's a lot in this
market to be gained -- and lost."
According to Arun Taneja, founder and analyst with the Taneja
Group, dedupe stands to change the face of the entire storage
industry over the next several years. "Data protection is changing
in a fundamental way for the first time in 25 years," he said. "I
think you'll see entirely new leadership in the industry three
years from now -- that's how dramatic a change we're talking
about."
Right now, as the customer base for dedupe products grows, every
company with a product in the game is trying to become one of those
leaders -- hence the squabbling among vendors that can ultimately
confuse users when it comes to evaluating products for purchase,
particularly in the case of Avamar and Diligent.
The two products, though both are addressing the same problem
and the same potential customer base, "are apples and oranges,"
according to Taneja. The primary difference -- and primary
battleground between the two -- is where deduplication should live
in the overall secondary storage environment.
Target vs. source
Avamar's Axiom product deduplicates at the source, through an
agent on the application server, sending only changes across the
network to the backup target. Diligent, meanwhile, deduplicates
data using a proprietary algorithm while the data is on its way in
to the backup target, which in Diligent's case is a virtual
tape library (VTL).
Let the games begin.
"We believe that there is a place for deduplication at the
target, especially over the next few years," said Yueh, adding that
EMC has plans to integrate Avamar's dedupe into its own VTL
product, the EMC Disk Library, in the short term.
"There's low-lying fruit there, obviously, since we already have
the product," Yueh said.
However, EMC/Avamar is betting that ultimately, the more
disruptive approach of deduping at the source will be the one that
wins out. Avamar's software necessitates a rip-and-replace of the
user's existing backup environment, something Yueh acknowledged can
make it a tough sell right now.
"We work with customers, particularly in large environments, to
transition them gradually to our product." Doesn't that mean the
user ends up managing two backup environments, at least for a
while? "Yes, but if you understand tape backup, our interface is
very intuitive," Yueh said. More to the point, he added, more than
400 users have already taken the plunge.
"Avamar struggled early on in the game trying to pitch those
first 10 or 15 customers," Taneja recalled. "Reception has always
been good to their concept, but actual traction took a long
time."
And, of course, Diligent is still harping with all its might on
Avamar's disruptiveness. "They say they have 400 customers, but how
many are in the Fortune 1000?" Yates asked. (Diligent itself has
150 customers; Avamar declined to comment on its number of Fortune
1000 installs). "How much data do they have under management?"
Two physical petabytes (PB), according to Yueh -- which can
restore to over 60 PB. "Just one of my customers purchased 2 PB
usable storage from me in the fourth quarter last year," Yates
scoffed. "Avamar is not suited to large enterprise environments or
large enterprise customers who are not going to uninstall an
established backup player."
In addition to going back and forth about backup disruption, the
two competitors are also deep in debate over deduplication ratios.
Yates claims Avamar doesn't count the "prime" or first full backup
against its deduplication ratio. For instance, a 1 terabyte (TB)
volume would need to be backed up in full before changes could be
compared against it, Yates said. "Avamar doesn't incorporate that
when it calculates deduplication ratios -- it's misleading," he
said.
"That's how his solution works," Yueh fired back. "We
don't even have a first-time full backup -- even the prime is
usually a third to half the size of the original because we
eliminate redundant blocks the first time, too."
What's the bottom line?
There are further points of contention, all around the
nitty-gritty of performance numbers and the merits of different
algorithms, but the first question for users to consider as the
first-time adoption phase for dedupe continues is the place it
should occupy in the environment, Taneja said. "Everything else,
from performance to dedupe ratios, is a secondary consideration,"
he said. (For a deeper analysis of dedupe products, see
Storage magazine's feature,
The skinny on data deduplication,
Jan. 2007.)
"If the majority of my applications are in one centralised,
local environment right now, I'd probably go the VTL route," Taneja
said. (Other deduping VTLs include FalconStor Software Inc.'s
VirtualTape Library and Sepaton's DeltaStor product. Another
notable name in this area is Data Domain Inc.)
"Meanwhile, Avamar also reduces the amount of information
transferred over a network because it dedupes at the source. If I
have lots of remote offices, it can reduce not only backups but
bandwidth demands dramatically," making a product like Avamar or
Symantec Corp.'s NetBackup PureDisk potentially more appealing,
Taneja said.
Ultimately, however, Taneja came down on the side of Avamar when
it came to the long-term resting place for dedupe and said that
major players, like Symantec and EMC, are proving it by folding
dedupe into backup software products. Symantec announced that it
plans to integrate PureDisk into its main NetBackup product last
week, and "I can guarantee you there are engineers at EMC right now
working on swapping out the back end of Legato Networker with
Avamar," Taneja said.