EMC channel jumps on dedupe opportunity

Several of Australia's largest systems integrators have put staff forward for certification and training around Data Domain's deduplication technology, the subject of a hard-fought bidding war between EMC and NetApp.

EMC, which wound up winning the bidding war, claims its information courses on Data Domain's technology held in Sydney and Melbourne have been "standing room only."

Dimension Data has confirmed it is putting six of its staff through technical training around the product "with a view to certification."

Shane Moore, product marketing manager at EMC Australia said Brennan IT was also using the product as part of a managed service.

"Some of our partners have sent five or more staff to get certified, " he said. "Many were sitting on the fence with this technology - but as soon as the acquisition was announced, they realised the technology is here for the long term. There is now a high demand to be certified."

Moore said EMC has a strong partner network to offer Data Domain's technology.

"There will simply be a lot more power in terms of numbers of people because of EMC's large channel program," he said. "And before this, Data Domain only had 880 staff, while EMC has 40,000 worldwide."

Moore said that prior to EMC's acquisition, a major Australian airline and several government agencies, local councils and service organisations had invested in Data Domain's appliances.

Why the fuss?

Why was NetApp and EMC in a bidding war for Data Domain?

Moore explained that traditionally, back-up has been "target-based" - the usual target being the tape library.

The first generation of disk-based back up systems, such as EMC's own Avamar, used deduplication smarts while making a backup image to a disk system. But organisations tended to still replicate that disk image to tape afterwards.

Data Domain's technology allows administrators to use their existing backup software to backup over the ethernet network to a Data Domain appliance.

Moore claimed that Data Domain deduplication allows for twenty times more data to sit on the same physical disk footprint, and also allows for easy replication of data from one appliance to another - negating the need to take the extra step to tape.

"This technology changes the economics," he said. "It is far more cost effective than tape. You may be able to keep 90 days of data on backups on the disk system and avoid going to tape by replicating that data from one site to another via a replication capability built-in to the appliance."

Moore said Data Domain's technology could reduce tape usage by 95 percent.

"You also might no longer need to replicate SAN [storage area network] data from one site to another - you can simple restore from your replicated backup of data on another site if it is also sitting on a Data Domain appliance."

EMC last week introduced cascaded replication to the Data Domain appliance - which allows administrators to replicate from the production system onto a secondary system and a third or fourth if necessary  - creating a "bunker" capability.

Moore said this would provide an added level of assurance for customers - should their secondary site fail, they can replicate to a third and so on.