NetApp Buys Data Domain

NetApp is making a serious move into the disk backup and disk archive market, laying $1.5 billion on the table to acquire Data Domain. If you are a regular reader of my blog on Byte and Switch you know that in general I am skeptical of most technology acquisitions, but this one may be an exception. It has the potential to give NetApp an incredible advantage in the environment -- they just have to manage the integration.

NetApp's Responsibility -- Do no harm, but do something

NetApp of course positions this as non-disruptive to their current offerings. Really it is too soon to tell what will happen and to some extent not fair for us to expect NetApp have all the answers. What we have to hope is that NetApp lets Data Domain be Data Domain and where Data Domain is a better fit, have the NetApp products step out of the way, at least until the Data Domain technology can be integrated in.

The best advice is to let Data Domain run as a stand alone entity for a very long period of time and then slowly in the background pull some of the Data Domain technology into the traditional NetApp products.

Deduplication is not a feature -- its a market.

"Deduplication is just a feature" is a common claim that you hear suppliers make when they either don't have or don't have a good deduplication capability. NetApp obviously does not agree ... you don't pay $1.5 billion dollars for something that is going to be "just a feature". NetApp will do something with Data Domain, and I am not sure why but my gut tells me they are going to get the most out of this and it will be the exception to the normally high failure rate of technology acquisitions.

How the industry responds will be based on how well they feel NetApp is going to do with the integration of the Data Domain technology.

To that end, EMC I think will feel like it has to do something. Despite that, initially I expect them to say they are going to do nothing -- business as usual. EMC is heavily impacted. I can see no other option for them other than to respond with an equivalent acquisition. That may very well be Quantum, but as I have outlined in other entries that may not be the best choice. As NetApp just proved, everyone is fair game.

HDS is the other interesting party here. In contrast to NetApp's clear beliefs that deduplication is not a feature, HDS in past conversations has indicated to me that they believe deduplication is a feature. We'll see who is right. I expect HDS to continue to partner, but an acquisition of CommVault would be interesting.

The other large players have already made a choice to a large extent. HP has a relationship with Sepaton and on the low end has done their own work. IBM has Dilligent -- I don't really see them doing anything else. Sun/Oracle is too busy trying to figure out Sun/Oracle, so I don't think we will see anything there.

As for the rest of the storage gang, they will have to either partner with newly acquired HiFn, Ocarina Networks and other storage agnostic dedupers. This group could be a huge winner in all of this. Dedupe just become front and center and everyone is going to have to have a solution or explain why they do not.

Regardless of the real world outcomes, NetApp has certainly made the next few weeks interesting.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on data center unification. Download the report here (registration required).