Deduplication is a challenge to most large storage vendors. IT means they get to sell fewer disk drives, and their business plans involve more drives. I expect most vendors will go through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief in confronting this dilemma. You can already see it in practice in some of the biggest vendors.
Denial:
- Internally: Deduplication is too slow and it puts data at risk. It ain't real storage, it doesn't work. Their implementation is risky!
- Tell customers: How about a free VTL with your next SAN/NAS upgrade? Let's get lunch.
Anger:
- Internally: Who do they think they are? Dedupe is a fad! Real storage is tons of platters, spindles, lots of sheet metal. This whole industry is going to hell! We need to muddy the water. Buy or OEM something fast and hopefully cheap. Start blogging!
- Tell customers: How 'bout a deal on your next VTL expansion? Running out of space? Right now we can discount VTL really low. I wouldn't bring this up, but I see you're talking to Data Domain...Did I tell you we have box seats at the game next week?
Bargaining:
- Internally: We need to do something. Our sales people are screaming bloody murder! Can we resell something cheap? One size does not fit all.Toss something out we have lying around in the labs. We bundled it in enough deals to tell IDC we have market share, so stop bugging us.
- Tell customers: Please spend a month to review our VTL. Look, it has a little deduper in it. No? Take some more time, look at out esoteric backup software - it has that dedupe thing you have been asking about! No? We can get you a deal on it with that SAN upgrade we have been talking about. We totally understand your needs. Use some professional services hours. Oh, you need our challenging dedupe NAS. No?
Depression:
- Internally: Crap, this stuff isn't going away. What, they went public? We let the market decide, and it turned out we got weak products, by (choose one) trying to preserve and bolt on to our existing designs - or - we OEM'd weak products for time-to-market from vendors who were desperate. (Sigh)
- Tell customers: What's the difference anyway? It's just a feature! What? It's not? You need to test it? Look at this roadmap. This PDF says we check almost as many options as they do. I'm sure we have a reference somewhere...
Acceptance:
- Internally: Wonder if they are accepting resumes?
- Tell customers: We are working on something else, we need more time. Wait for us! I'm serious, our backup software may be less fussy now. We can talk over lunch.
