HP said its StoreOnce B6200 disk target with Cataylst can ingest data at 100 TB per hour with the maximum of four two-node pairs, compared to EMC’s claim of 31 TB/hour with its new Data Domain DD990 with DD Boost. However, the B6200’s nodes are siloed. That means an eight-node system actually consists of four separate pools, and it would take an aggregate performance to get to 100 TB/hour.

In an email, an EMC backup/recovery spokesman pointed out the DD990 would achieve 620 TB/per hour if measured the same way that HP measures performance. EMC’s 31 TB/hour claim is for a single storage pool but 20 pools can be managed from one Data Domain Enterprise Manager console.

According to EMC’s e-mail, “As lofty as they sometimes seem, we do make a concerted effort to keep our performance claims reasonable and defensible. This announcement by HP was, by contrast, very much a smoke and mirrors effort.”

The truth is that all vendor performance claims – including benchmarks – should be taken with a grain of salt because they are achieved in optimal conditions, often with hardware configurations that would bring the price up considerably. A smart backup admin knows that performance will vary, and these vendor claims need to be verified in real-world tests.

Permabit aims dedupe software at flash arrays

With the adoption rate of dedupe for primary storage slower than anticipated, Permabit this week unveiled Albireo for Flash Technologies, which is really a flashy way of saying it supports solid-state storage with its Albireo Software Development Kit (SDK) and Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) for Linux.

Permabit does not sell Albireo software directly, but makes its SDK and VDO available for OEM partners.

Permabit founder and CTO Jered Floyd says primary dedupe adoption is slow because the large established storage vendors resist the notion of cutting into disk sales by shrinking data. (The large vendors dispute this, and all have or are working on some type of dedupe for primary data). Floyd maintains the benefits and needs for primary dedupe for flash are greater than for disk arrays, and the startups selling flash systems are more open to incorporating dedupe.

“We believe dedupe will be a basic required feature for any flash platform,” he said. “Permabit makes it so these companies building new flash platforms can easily and rapidly integrate dedupe.

Does dedupe have to be different for data on flash than hard disk? Floyd said there are benefits and challenges for dedupe on flash that goes beyond dedupe on hard drives. He said dedupe can not only significantly lower the cost per gigabyte of flash but also help improve latency and reliability and avoid wear by reducing the number of writes on a system. Floyd claims Albireo can meet the high demands of flash by handling more than 250,000 IOPS on a single core processor.

Permabit CEO Tom Cook said “a handful” of flash vendors are involved in the early access program for Albireo and he has commitments form a few. He expects to announce deals in the second half of the year.

It will be interesting to see who signs up for Albireo. All-flash startups such as Nimbus Data, Greenbytes, Pure Storage, SolidFire, and XtremIO have dedupe or are promising it for when they begin shipping. Does that mean the market for Albireo is smaller than Permabit anticipates?

“It would be a mistake to assume we’re not working with vendors who have announced dedupe but have not yet delivered,” Floyd said. “Not having dedupe in a flash storage system is going to be a huge liability.”

HDS prepares primary dedupe appliance

Hitachi Data Systems is planning primary data reduction for its newly released Hitachi Unified Storage, as well as a deduplication appliance, according to Fred Oh, HDS’ senior product marketing manager for NAS. He said data reduction for the file portion of the HUS will be available this year and the appliance is expected in the summer. Oh wouldn’t say if HDS is using technology from Permabit, which had an OEM deal with NAS vendor BlueArc before HDS acquired BlueArc.

FalconStor provides inline dedupe option

FalconStor added inline dedupe to its virtual tape library (VTL) product, FalconStor VTL 7.5. FalconStor now supports inline, concurrent and post-processing dedupe as well as its Turbo dedupe option for post-processing.

In the early days of dedupe, the inline versus post-process issue was hotly debated. Inline requires less disk capacity on the back end because it reduces data before moving it to the backup target. Post-processing dedupes at the target, so it requires more capacity but is usually the faster method. Faster processors have alleviated inline dedupe speed concerns, and some of the early post-processing advocates have added an inline option or switched from post-processing to inline.

FalconStor claims its dedupe options are the most flexible.

“We added inline dedupe as a fourth choice,” said Darrell Riddle, FalconStor senior director of product marketing. “We see it as a good fit for smaller systems or systems that need more power up front.”
For a four-node VTL cluster, FalconStor claims its inline dedupe can handle more than 28 TB per hour and post-processing dedupe can back up more than 40 TB per hour.

FalconStor’s concurrent dedupe runs post-process, but does not wait until all backups are completed before deduping on the back end. Riddle said FalconStor VTL customers can also turn off dedupe if they have little or no compressable data.

FalconStor VTL 7.5 software costs from $2,500 to $4,500 per terabyte under management, depending on the configuration.

EMC gives Oracle RMAN a DD Boost

EMC extended its deduplication accelerating DD Boost software to Oracle RMAN, an application known for getting poor deduplication ratios.

NetApp executives played down the speculation. They said they didn’t need a backup platform, but they wanted Data Domain because its leading position in data deduplication for backup was disruptive and driving strong revenue growth. EMC, which paid $2.1 billion to outbid NetApp for Data Domain, has continued to grow that business despite a plethora of competitors.

NetApp has since made several smaller acquisitions – the largest was LSI’s Engenio systems division – but stayed away from backup. But a few rough quarters have caused NetApp’s stock price to shrink, and now the rumors have returned that it is hunting for backup.

A Bloomberg story today pegged backup software vendor CommVault and disk and tape backup vendor Quantum as the main targets. The story was based more on speculation from Wall Street analysts than sources who said any deals were in the works, but such an acquisition wouldn’t surprise many in the industry.

“I think NetApp needs to acquire companies and technologies, and bring in talent from the outside,” Kaushik Roy, managing director of Wall Street firm Merriman Capital, told Storage Soup.

CommVault and Quantum were among the companies believed to be on NetApp’s shopping list in 2009. A few things have changed. NetApp signed an OEM deal to sell CommVault’s SnapProtect array-based snapshot software earlier this year. That deal is in its early stages. NetApp hasn’t sold much CommVault software yet, but perhaps the partnership is a test run for how much demand there is and could lead to an acquisition.

Quantum was EMC’s dedupe partner before it bought Data Domain. If NetApp bought Quantum in 2009, it could’ve been taken as NetApp picking up EMC’s leftovers. But Quantum has revamped its entire DXi dedupe platform since then, expanded its StorNext archiving platform and acquired virtual server backup startup Pancetera. Those developments could prompt NetApp to take another look.

There are also smaller dedupe vendors out there, most notably Sepaton in the enterprise virtual tape library (VTL) space and ExaGrid in the midrange NAS target market.

However, people who suspect NetApp will make a move expect it will be a big one. CommVault would be the most expensive with a market cap of $1.9 billion and strong enough revenue growth to stand on its own without getting bought. Quantum, which finally showed signs of life in its disk backup business last quarter, has a $524 million market cap but most of its revenue still comes from the low-growth tape business.

Storage technology analyst Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group said buying CommVault would make the most sense if NetApp wants to take on its arch rival EMC in backup. While NetApp was the first vendor to sell deduplication for primary data, it is missing out on the lucrative backup dedupe market.

“NetApp needs to get something going in the data protection side,” Tanjea said. “They’ve missed millions of dollars in the last two years [since EMC bought Data Domain].

“If they want to be full competitors against EMC – and what choice do they have -– CommVault would be better for NetApp to buy. In one fell swoop, CommVault covers a lot of ground against EMC — backup software, dedupe technology at the target and source, and archiving, too.”

Arkeia began delivering its backup software on appliances four years ago, and this week launched its third generation of appliances. They include the data deduplication that Arkeia added to its software a year ago, solid state drives (SSDs) to accelerate updates to the backup catalog, and up to 20 TB of internal disk on the largest model.

“Since 2007, we’ve been telling everybody that appliances would be big,” Evans said. “Symantec has validated the market for us.”

Evans said about 25% of Arkeia’s customers buy appliances. Because they take less time to set up and manage, he said appliances are popular in remote offices and among organizations without much IT staff.

The new appliances are the R120 (1 TB usable), the R220 (2 TB, 4 TB or 6 TB), the R320 (8TB or 16 TB) and the R620 (10 TB or 20 TB). The two smaller models include optional LTO-4 tape drives while the two larger units support 8 Gbps Fibre Channel to move data off to external tape libraries and RAID 6. They all include Arkeia Network Backup 9 software and built-in support for VMware vSphere. Arekeia’s progressive dedupe for source and target data is included with the R320 and R620, and optional with the R220. Pricing ranges from $3,500 for the R120 to $47,000 to the R620 with 20 TB.

The R620 includes 256 GB SSDs, enough to manage the backup catalog. “We would never put backup sets on SSDs, that would be too expensive,” Evans said. “But it makes sense to use SSDs to manage our catalog, which is a database of our backups. The catalog is random, and updating the catalog could be a performance bottleneck.”

“If we were simply a cloud gateway and combined SSDs and disk in a single package, we wouldn’t know what incoming data should live on SSD and what should live on disk. It all looks the same. Because we wrote the [backup] application, we could say ‘this data lives on disk and this data lives on SSD.’”

For disaster recovery, the appliances can be used to boot a failed machine by downloading software from a backup server to the failed machine. The appliances can also replicate data to cloud service providers.

During the vendor’s earnings conference call Wednesday night, executives made it clear they are counting on the new midrange releases to revitalize its slumping disk backup business. Quantum’s disk and software revenues dropped last quarter, causing it to fall short of overall revenue forecasts.

Quantum added client-side dedupe with DXi Accent, and increased the scalability and connectivity options of its midrange appliances. Quantum CEO Jon Gacek said he is optimistic that these improvements will make the DXi platform more competitive with EMC’s Data Domain.

“With the changes we made, it’s a damn good product,” he said in an interview with Storage Soup. “If my sales team can’t sell this, I’ve got big problems.”

This isn’t the first time Quantum has revamped its disk backup products. Quantum refreshed its entire DXi hardware line following a rocky start that included an OEM deal with EMC that was terminated in 2009. It also rolled out DXi 2.0 software in March. But that didn’t do the trick.

Quantum’s total revenue last quarter was $153.5 million, below its $160 million forecast. Disk and software revenue – the DXi and StorNext platforms – came in at $27.6 million, down from $34.7 million the previous year. DXi revenue reached only 70% of the vendor’s internal plans, with the biggest shortfall on the DXi 6000 midrange platform.

Gacek said part of the sales slump came because Quantum rolled out DXi 2.0 software on the 6500 system but not on the 6700, causing confusion for his sales team and channel partners. Now Quantum is collapsing five 6500 and 6700 midrange configurations into two, and the 6701 can be upgraded in the field to the 6702. However, Quantum is bringing out its new DXi Accent software in phases – it is not expected to be available on the enterprise DXi8500 platform until late this year.

“I’d like to have it on 8500 as well, but we have to make some tradeoffs,” Gacek said.

Quantum is looking for the new releases to bring it into more deals with Data Domain. Gacek said when Quantum runs into Data Domain now, EMC will drop its price to win the deal.

“They dismiss our technology as being inadequate, yet they’re fighting so hard when we’re in deals with them,” he said. “I don’t think they price like that when we’re not in deals. We need to get in front of more customers.”

He said Quantum’s DXi win rate last quarter dropped to 45% from 55% the previous quarter.

Revenue from Quantum’s StorNext file archiving software also declined , taking a nine percent drop over last year. Quantum is counting on a recently signed reseller deal with NetApp and a new StorNext appliance for rich media customers to spark sales of that product.

Quantum’s tape automation business did grow eight percent over last year. “Tape is far from dead,” Gacek said on the earnings call.

Overall, Gacek said “We are not pleased with our revenue” in the first quarter of its fiscal year. “This start puts us a little behind for the year, but we plan to make it up.”

Quantum CEO Jon Gacek revealed details of the vendor’s product roadmap over the next year Tuesday during its quarterly earnings call. Along with source dedupe, Quantum will add a NAS interface to its DXi 6700 midrange backup system and enhance the DXi software’s capability for protecting data in virtualized environments. Gacek said Quantum is also planning to deliver its StorNext archiving software on appliances and upgrade its Scaler i6000 enterprise tape library with improvements for archiving, high availability and security.

After the earnings call, Gacek disclosed a little more about Quantum’s product plans to StorageSoup. He said the DXi source-based dedupe would consist of client software running on servers that would dedupe data over the wire to improve performance and require less bandwidth. “We have a competitor that sells that as two products,” Gacek said, referring to EMC. “We’ll sell it as an integrated solution. One product is better than two.”

Quantum’s source-side dedupe follows the EMC Avamar model. While EMC recently improved Avamar’s performance when used with its Data Domain target dedupe, customers still must buy both products to get source and target dedupe.

The inclusion of source and target dedupe in one product is not unique — most major backup software applications support both. But Quantum is most focused on competing with Data Domain, the giant in the disk backup market.

Quantum still lacks global deduplication, which dedupes across multiple nodes as if they were one node. Data Domain added that feature across two nodes last year with its Global Deduplication Array.

The midrange DXi 6700 is currently a Fibre Channel virtual tape library (VTL) interface device. Quantum will add multiprotocol support, just as it has for its enterprise DXi 8500 system that launched last year. The DXi 6700 will support VTL, NFS, CIFS, and Symantec OpenStorage (OST) interfaces. Quantum’s other midrange and SMB DXi devices are NAS-only.

With StorNext, Quantum is following the path Symantec recently set by offering its FileStor software on an appliance. But Gacek said Quantum will have several appliance choices for different markets and use cases. He said the goal is to make StorNext easier to implement than it is now as a software sale that requires customers to set up their hardware based on their workloads. “We’ll flavor the appliances to go after different types of customers,” Gacek said.

Gacek, who replaced Rick Belluzzo as Quantum CEO April 4, will also revamp the company’s sales force to assign sales teams based on customers’ size and industry instead of by geography and specific product.

Gacek said Quantum’s goal is to provide alternatives for customers and channel partners to EMC’s Data Domain disk backup and Oracle/Sun tape libraries.

EMC sold Quantum’s DXi software before acquiring Data Domain, and Quantum is still looking to recover from the revenue it lost when EMC dropped its OEM deal.

Quantum grew its branded disk and software revenue 38% to $113 million for the fiscal year that ended in March, yet its overall revenue of $672 million fell one percent because of the loss of OEM revenue. Its $165 million in sales last quarter was slightly up over the previous year, however.

The $820 million Compellent acquisition gives Dell a second SAN product to go with its 2008 EqualLogic iSCSI SAN buy. Dell executives say the smaller 2010 acquisitions of Exanet and Ocarina will complement those SAN purchases.

Dell is close to completing the integration of Exanet’s clustered NAS file system with EqualLogic and entry level PowerVault storage. Those products will launch in mid-year, probably at the inaugural Dell Storage Forum conference in June. Later this year, they expect to add Ocarina’s content-aware compression and data deduplication into the Exanet file system.

Longer range plans – probably in 2012 — include integrating the Exanet file system with Compellent storage, developing dedupe for block storage, and coming up with a common management application for EqualLogic, Compellent and Exanet.

“Exanet and Ocarina will become ubiquitous technologies across the two platforms,” said Travis Vigil, Dell’s executive director of product marketing for enterprise storage. “We’ll have a file system that will provide unified storage for EqualLogic, PowerVault and Compellent. Once you get that common file system, we can take things that EqualLogic and Compellent have done with automated tiering and load balancing within the array and do that across the storage environment.”

Vigil admitted there is overlap between EqualLogic – which plays in the low to middle of the midrange – and Compellent, which sells into the middle and higher end of the midrange. The plan is to extend Compellent higher into the enterprise to fill some of the gap left when Hewlett-Packard outbid Dell for 3PAR last year. “If you don’t have overlap, you have a gap,” Vigil said.

Vigil said Dell will not sell the Ocarina Storage Optimizer dedupe appliances that Ocarina sold before the acquisition, but will support customers who bought the products.

Dell also will continue to OEM EMC Clariion SAN, Celerra NAS and the smaller Data Domain backup devices for the current lifecycle of those products, but Vigil said the “our focus is on Dell IP and the fluid data architecture.” Dell will resell but not OEM the EMC VNX unified storage systems that will eventually replace the Clariion and Celerra families.

We know that because CommVault CEO Bob Hammer sounded more like a product marketing manager than a CEO discussing his company’s earnings earlier this week.

Hammer gave a quick rundown of CommVault’s earnings – in line with the disappointing preliminary results it gave last month. After assuring financial analysts that things are looking up this quarter, he spent most of the call talking about Simpana 9.

Highlights of that product, which will include source- and target-side data deduplication:

“We’ll enable the customer to dedupe at the source, target, or in between, at a very high scale and with the deduplication volume being fully indexed,” Hammer said. “All those are unique. Nobody has fully indexed dedupe, nobody can dedupe at the source or target, or manage dedupe in the stack across different storage silos.”

When I spoke to Hammer after the call, he expanded on the “dedupe everywhere” concept.

“It’s not just dedupe. Dedupe is a feature but it has to be managed across the stack and it has to be application specific,” he said. “What we’re seeing is to manage your data and data movement, you have to automate the virtualization layer granularly with application-specific information to manage virtual nodes that are moving dynamically. You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of these nodes. And you have to manage them to a storage space across all hardware silos. You don’t just move them with snapshots and replication. They have to be indexed and granular, and you have to be able to move them down the storage stack, across silos and into the cloud.”

Despite his enthusiasm about the new release, Hammer remained disappointed in sales from last quarter. CommVault’s revenue was $66.3, as it forecasted in July. That was more than $5 million below Wall Street expectations. Hammer did say many deals that failed to close by the end of the quarter have since closed. The quarter was the first of CommVault’s fiscal year, and Hammer said he hasn’t lower expectations for the full year.

“We had a big hole [last quarter],” he said. “Now our objective is to catch up.”

During their last earnings report conference call in April, FalconStor execs hinted that they were working on partnerships with HDS. They didn’t disclose what products were involved, but there were rumblings around the industry that HDS had agreed to sell FalconStor’s FDS dedupe either through an OEM or reseller deal.

The reseller arrangement means HDS will sell the FalconStor products under the FalconStor brand rather than the HDS brand.

Nexsan and SpectraLogic also resell FalconStor deduplication software, but HDS is now the largest FalconStor dedupe partner as the software vendor looks to replace revenue lost from EMC and Sun over the past year. EMC sells a lot less FalconStor VTL software now that it has Data Domain deduplication boxes in its portfolio. After buying Sun, Oracle ended Sun’s reseller arrangement for FalconStor VTL and dedupe software.

“We have a very tight relationship with HDS now,” FalconStor marketing VP Fadi Albatal said. “There’s a lot of collaboration between the two companies.”

But FalconStor’s collaborator was strangely silent for this announcement. There were no HDS executives quoted in the press release, and requests I made to HDS for comment over the last two days went unanswered. The HDS deduplication strategy remains unclear. It sells CommVault’s backup software with dedupe through an OEM deal, and has a reseller deal for Diligent ProtecTier VTL and dedupe software dating to before IBM acquired Diligent in 2008. Sepaton uses HDS hardware as the backend storage for its VTLs with dedupe. Sepaton execs claim HDS sales people have financial incentives to sell Sepaton’s VTLs, but HDS hasn’t confirmed that.

If HDS has a preferred dedupe partner among those options, it isn’t saying.

Meanwhile, Albatal says FalconStor is considering extending its dedupe capabilities to primary storage. “We have the building blocks,” he said. “Primary deduplication has to be a post-process method, which is the nature of our solution. We won’t have something in the near future, but it’s something we will be looking at.”

During Quantum’s earnings call Thursday evening, CEO Rick Belluzzo said there would be further enhancements to the company’s deduplication in the wake of a rollout of midrange and SMB DXi disk systems over the past six months. When I spoke to Belluzzo after the call he stopped short of addressing global dedupe, except to say Quantum won’t be following Data Domain’s path. Quantum apparently sees its StorNext file system as a piece of its strategy to scale its backup targets.

“We will be saying more about our roadmap over time,” Belluzzo said. “We also have the StorNext platform to build from. I would expect our strategy to differ from Data Domain in terms of their approach to global deduplication. We have a scalable platform in StorNext, and it’s a better platform to deliver a scalable solution. And Data Domain is still pretty limited [for global deduplication].”

Data Domain’s GDA clusters two nodes at this stage, and requires Symantec’s OpenStorage (OST) API and either Symantec NetBackup or Backup Exec to control the placement of data across multiple controllers.

Analyst Greg Schulz of StorageIO says customers who need global dedupe are mostly large enterprises who may already be using Quantum tape libraries and may be willing to wait for the global dedupe.

“Quantum will have to evolve to global dedupe, it’s part of scaling,” he said. “If you have hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of data, you need more robust deduplication going forward. Quantum has more time because people in that category are still using tape. Quantum has to get there, but it can walk to that market and get it right opposed to others who have to sprint there.”

With or without global dedupe, Belluzzo says he expects Quantum to make a big push in disk backup this year, and it has a long way to go to make up ground on Data Domain. Quantum reported $22.9 million of revenue from its disk (DXi dedupe platform) and software (StorNext) last quarter, down from $24.2 million in the same quarter last year.

“It is still very early in the evolution of this technology,” he said. “We believe the deduplication market is growing rapidly. There have been reports on how many people have implemented it and it’s a very low amount. So we believe that the market definitely supports pretty rapid growth, and to be frank, our base is pretty small and we really feel like that we have to be focused on that kind of rapid growth.”

After losing its OEM relationship with EMC following EMC’s acquisition of Data Domain last summer, Quantum has been building up its own channel for branded products. “It’s been a year of working through transitions to strengthen the company,” Belluzzo said. Now he says Quantum is prepared to grow.

Quantum executives say the new dedupe OEM partner they announced in January – believed to be Fujitsu – is shipping product with DXi software but there are no new OEM deals imminent as the vendor concentrates on its branded products.