The storage press has sniffed out a good story recently. Today, Beth Pariseau has a piece up on her Storage Soup blog that hones in on the drama surrounding the technology du jour–deduplication.
The post, “HP to EMC/Data Domain: Bring it On” has a headline that’s reminiscent of the sort of fighting words we heard from our former president.
Pariseau writes: “Admittedly late to the data deduplication game, Hewlett-Packard Co. is brewing new dedupe offerings to compete with the market’s new 800-pound gorilla — EMC/Data Domain. … HP partners with Sepaton for high-end VTLs and Ocarina for primary storage data reduction, but also develops deduplication software for its entry-level disk backup devices.”
Earlier this week, Chris Mellor at The Register covered the HP-Ocarina partnership news, also talking about it in terms of the rising competition for a complete dedupe solution. His article “HP Makes Ocarina Music” has a subhead that speaks volumes: “Ocarina close to clean sweep of file vendors.”
Mellor writes: “Ocarina has similar partnerships with BlueArc, EMC and Isilon. It looks almost inevitable that every other filer supplier must be looking at the Ocarina product and thinking a reseller deal might be a good idea. Otherwise, it could lose sales to the competition when a lot of image-type data is being stored.”
It will be interesting to see how this story unfolds. We vendor bloggers are already chattering about the recent partnership announcement, such as this post on the HP Storageworks “Around The Storage Block” blog. The post, by Pete Brey, WW Extreme Storage Business Development Manager, homes in on two recent HP announcements. First, its recent acquisition of IBRIX, and second its partnership with Ocarina.
Brey writes: “Now multi-petabyte systems are great when you have zillions of files that need to be stored but so is a multi-petabyte system that is optimized so that in the same space tens of zillions can be contained. This is where Ocarina’s ECOsystem software adds its value to our NAS products. The ECOsystem software transforms your storage with its content-aware storage optimization that compresses data up to 10:1 with added features such as deduplication, ECOsnap snapshots, and its own global name space capability. The unique thing about our reseller partnership is that HP can run the ECOsystem software right on our NAS nodes, further optimizing your infrastructure. Now there aren’t too many storage vendors out there who can talk about that now, are there?”
Bragging rights, indeed.
Clearly, it’s too soon to say exactly how each player in this space will benefit and/or lose out. As Mellor’s piece obliquely refers to, this isn’t about Ocarina setting itself in opposition to any vendors–in fact, it has a partnership with EMC. Rather, it shows how each provides a piece of the puzzle. In the big picture, there needs to be a shift in thinking towards something more along the lines of end-to-end dedupe–something that our lead blogger Carter George talked about at length in his popular post, “The Dedupe (R)evolution.” But in the short-run it’s certainly good to see how each vendor is distinguishing itself, and working hard to provide the most efficient, cost-effective storage options to its customers.
