Crowded Data Pool

5:45 PM -- Coincidence, or footnote to the multitude of storage vendor skirmishes that occur in any given week?

I ask this as we emerge from all sorts of continuous data protection (CDP) introductions or add-ons in the last several days. (See EMC Takes CDP Downmarket , Mendocino Embraces Near-CDP, Tilana Runs on Vista, and FalconStor Tunes Up InfiniBand.)

Maybe this is what happens when vendors anticipate announcements from market-leaders like EMC -- put out any related news you have and ride the coattails of the bigger guys. That probably gives vendors too much credit for timing that's more serendipitous than calculated.

What vendors have done in the last week is to fill in CDP's gap -- on pricing, scale, and capabilities -- CDP for SMBs, CDP and near-CDP together for the first time on the same platform, CDP that makes your data really sparkle, unlike that store-bought stuff.

This kind of crowded pool might lead some to conclude that CDP's become much more ordinary, possibly even commoditized. Sadly, that's not the case, and the backup method certainly hasn't gotten any cheaper. As the Clipper Group's Dianne McAdam rightly observes, the five-figure price tag of CDP isn't going to attract tons of new small business revenue.Maybe EMC and Co. would have been smarter to fill in that last missing link: clustered NAS. That higher-end customer has a greater willingness to pay and doesn't flinch at big-ticket expenditures. Their requirement to rewind the backup tape to a fraction of a second is also a lot more pressing than a chain of local hardware stores, for example.

In any case, stay tuned for a few more me-too CDP introductions.

Terry Sweeney, Editor in Chief, Byte and Switch