But Frank Slootman, president of EMC’s data backup and recovery division and Data Domain’s CEO until EMC acquired the company last year, says there is no dedupe in Nimble’s storage. Slootman saw my story on SearchStorage about Nimble, and sent an email claiming “there is no dedupe in

Nimble whatsoever. Read their white paper, or just ask them. We did. They do have local compression.”

I did ask Nimble CEO Varun Mehta when I spoke to him before their launch. He said his storage systems use inline compression for primary data and dedupe for backups. And according to Nimble’s press release on its product launch (emphasis added):

The CS-Series is based on the company’s patent-pending architecture, Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL™), which enables fast inline data compression, intelligent data optimization leveraging flash memory and high-capacity disk, instant deduped backups, and WAN efficient replication – all in a single device. CASL allows organizations to reduce their capital expenditures for storage and backup by at least 60 percent, while eliminating the need for separate, disk-based backup.

And a data sheet on the Nimble web site states:

Nimble slashes IT costs by converging compressed primary storage, deduped backup storage, and disaster recovery into one solution.

Slootman is correct about the whitepaper, though. A paper called “A New Approach to Storage and Backup” on the Nimble site does not say it uses deduplication. It claims “Nimble Storage CASL provides in-line compression on all data” and in a section on its backup technology says “CASL enables instant, application-consistent backups on the same array with very efficient (up to 20x) backup capacity optimization.”

Capacity optimization could be dedupe or compression. But nowhere in the 15-page whitepaper does Nimble claim to dedupe backup data.

While Nimble execs said in press interviews that they dedupe, they had a different message at a blogger TechField Day in Seattle where the startup officially launched Thursday. Nimble presenters did not mention deduplication at the blogger event.

I asked Nimble for clarification about its mixed marketing, and its VP of marketing Dan Leary replied via email:

“Sorry if there was any confusion regarding deduplication. Nimble does not deduplicate in the Data Domain sense, where all duplicate blocks are eliminated using a content-based signature. Our snapshot-based block sharing eliminates duplicate blocks across backups like deduplication systems. Nimble compresses, but does not deduplicate, within a primary storage volume. However, we offer better space savings compared with any secondary storage. Secondary storage systems require a baseline copy of the original data to get started. Because converged storage doesn’t require a baseline full backup, Nimble provides even better capacity optimization than secondary storage. Look for an upcoming blog from our CTO who will cover this topic in more detail.”

If Nimble can shrink data enough to make backups and replication for DR more efficient without taking much of a performance while compressing, it may not make much of a difference how it’s doing it. Nimble beta tester Dave Conde, IT director of eMeter, says he’s found performance outstanding and he’s getting a reduction in data although he hasn’t measured the actual rate.

But if Nimble is deduping, EMC execs probably want to know just how close the startup’s dedupe technology is to the dedupe it paid $2.1 billion for when it acquired Data Domain.

In a follow-up email, Slootman attributed Nimble’s mixed message to “a disconnect with marketing. They probably mean like NetApp that their snapshots use block differentials. They should not be using the term [deduplication] so indiscriminately.”

Compellent’s revenue of $28.1 million in the first quarter of 2009 ticked up from $26.7 million in the last quarter of 2008. That earned Compellent $1 million in income. That and a 4% revenue increase are modest under normal circumstances but not bad during a recession. Compellent added 98 customers in the quarter, with 55% of its revenue coming from existing rather than new customers.

“We grew revenue by hitting a lot of singles,” Compellent CEO Phil Soran said. “We did not have large revenue deals to get us to this revenue growth.”

While it’s unlikely that big storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp are worried about a singles-hitter chipping away at their business, Compellent’s success helps showcase what people are spending their storage budgets on these days.

Compellent tends to sell its modular systems to smaller companies who use its software such as thin provisioning and Automated Tiered Storage to manage data better, and then buy more capacity when needed. These customers aren’t cutting back spending as much as large enterprises who have been overbuying storage for years.

“Selling into the enterprise is a little more challenging than in midsize enterprises, but we’ve made some inroads there,” Soran says, pointing to the addition of Travelers Insurance and the FBI as customers. “Large enterprises buy 30 terabytes every month whether they need it or not. The economy has affected them. In midsize companies, they know when they need it and they buy more storage when they need it. Customers still have to store data but find more efficient ways to do it.”

Compellent started rolling out solid state drives last quarter, and Soran says even midrange customers are using them. Hedge fund Munder Capital Management will appear at Compellent’s C-Drive users’ conference next week to discuss its use of SSDs with Complellent’s Storage Center system.

Automated Tiered Storage is a key piece of Compellent’s SSD strategy. The application is designed to move data intelligently among tiers, a capability industry experts and some of Compellent’s large competitors say will be necessary to make SSDs catch on.

“Automated Tiered Storage is the killer app for solid state devices,” Soran said. “People have to find a way to manage inactive data, and solid state heightens the need for it.”

Compellent also facilitates smaller purchases because it has one platform that customers upgrade by adding cards for different functionality and doing software upgrades instead of forklift upgrades. Soran says support for 8 Gbps FC, 10-Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and better integration with server virtualization is on the roadmap.

But Compellent’s streak of 14 straight quarters of sequential revenue growth is in jeopardy. The company’s guidance of from $27 million and $29 million for this quarter means it would have to get nearer the top than the bottom to increase over last quarter. It was also a little lower than financial analysts expected, although analysts see Compellent continue to stroke singles for the near future.

“In the field, we continue to see Compellent experience solid win rates, increasing deal sizes, and nice recurring revenue streams,” Amit Daryanani of RBC Capital Markets wrote in a note to clients. “Overall, we continue to see Compellent winning deals primarily on feature/function and scale.”