With so much talk about dedupe lately, it’s hard to know which aspect of it to discuss first. We’ll begin by addressing a question we occasionally hear–most recently from a comment on this very blog. The question can be summed up as: why someone would pay an extra amount for a solution such as Ocarina, rather than simply go with the dedupe that is free from NetApp (or another vendor)? This is not unlike the old saw “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” Well, the really quick answer in this case is that you are likely going to get a LOT more milk than you would otherwise be able to.
In any case, this question was one of many indications that we need to write a post or two to help clear up some points that may be confusing to those who aren’t deeply involved in this particular corner of the storage industry. So we thought it worthwhile to get into some detail with our response.
NetApp is the market leader in NAS, and they were pioneers in dedupe for online storage. If we at Ocarina are going to be successful, we have to explain why our technology is different and better than what they have.
NetApp is a model for both good technology and execution – and so is their recent acquisition, Data Domain. We have great respect and admiration for both companies, but we do have a better mousetrap when it comes to dedupe for online storage. It’s our job to tell the world about that. We’d love to partner with NetApp. In fact, we have NetApp customers who have purchased our product and are running it in production, having evaluated us against NetApp Dedupe. However, NetApp clearly feels they own “dedupe for primary” for their filers, and their purchase of Data Domain makes it clear that they intend to make storage efficiency and dedupe a major focus of the company going forward.
We are going to have to compete with their offerings. That’s fine – competition is what drives innovation and forward progress, and what makes the technology industry so much fun to work in! That said, then, if a company like Ocarina is going to be successful, we clearly have to do two things: 1) have a better mousetrap — if we’re not better than the thing you get for free, why would anyone buy our product? and 2) have a solution that works for both NetApp customers and non-NetApp shops.
NetApp Dedupe is pretty good for some things, but it has limitations. One obvious one is that it doesn’t help the EMC, HP, Isilon, Dell, IBM, BlueArc, or HDS NAS shop. It goes without saying that every NetApp customer will try the free dedupe first, and would only come to Ocarina after realizing that they need better results. If the NetApp dedupe is “good enough,” we do not expect customers to bring in Ocarina. However, there are several for whom it is not.
Keep in mind that the NAS market is huge, and growing faster than any other storage market segment. There are many other NAS vendors besides NetApp, and all the customers of all those storage vendors – from Windows file/print servers, to big players like EMC and HDS, to aggressive technology-leading NAS players like BlueArc and Isilon – are interested in the benefits of dedupe and storage efficiency for online storage. Ocarina wants those customers to know that that technology is available for all those platforms. You don’t have to buy a NetApp filer to get dedupe for online. And we want them to know that if they do go with Ocarina, they are not just paying for something on their storage that’s no better than what they’d get for free from NetApp. They are getting something better.
Now to the Storage Switzerland report that started so much of this discussion. It was about one thing: how well Ocarina object dedupe and content-aware compression shrinks data compared to NetApp dedupe. We think we did pretty well.
But there are other issues to consider. Two that always come up in every customer are 1) how fast can you dedupe a data set and 2) how fast can users and applications access data after it has been optimized? We’ll cover both of those topics in future benchmarks and reports, as they’re both very important topics.
I’d like to point out that there are also two other big considerations for customers who want to reduce their storage footprint using dedupe or compression technology. These are things that are less measurable in a lab report, but just as important.
One of those is the ability for a customer to buy one “dedupe for online” solution and have it work across storage from multiple vendors that they might have in house. Sure, some customers have only one file serving platform, but many have multiple. They have multiple tiers, or they have old stuff and new stuff, or they have a standard of Vendor A but got a lot of Vendor B stuff when they acquired and integrated another company.
With Ocarina, a customer can choose a single “dedupe for online” solution that would work across all those vendors’ storage – including NetApp – with a single interface, a unified management console, and even the ability to dedupe across platforms.
The second product design differentiator, and why people will pay for us instead of deploying something that’s free, is the granularity of optimization. With NetApp Dedupe, you either dedupe a volume or not. It only works on NetApp, and your choice for a given NetApp volume is dedupe or don’t dedupe. With Ocarina, you have any number of dials to choose from based on your specific needs. You can choose to optimize sets of files within a volume by fine-grained policy. Examples might be, don’t dedupe database files at all, dedupe Office and PDF files that are two days old, dedupe and compress all media, video and photo files that have not been modified for 10 days. Really, any mix of file type, age, or metadata characteristic can be used to create policies that determine not only whether a file gets optimized, but how aggressively – object dedupe only, object and subfile dedupe, object and subfile dedupe and lightweight compression, or all of the above and sophisticated content-aware compression. You can match your level of dedupe and compression to the SLA’s, business value, and characteristics of your files. I don’t know how you benchmark that, but it’s pretty significant.
With all this in mind, we plan a second post to delve into yet more issues related to the Ocarina-NetApp lab report, so please stay tuned.
