We're one month into it, and Spring is in full force here in the Silicon Valley. This season is all about rebirth, both figurative and literal, and as such, it seems like the time for our competition to dust off their old FUD, and try to put in a new spin on it. Tony Asaro in a recent post referred to one example.
The latest example stems from a post by Sepaton's resident blogger, Jay Livens, on the heels of their announcement that they closed a sixth round of funding.
He states:
"One of the questions I often get asked is 'how do your products compare to Data Domain's?' In my opinion, we really don't compare because we play in different market segments. Data Domain's strength is in the low-end of the market, think SMB/SME while SEPATON plays in the enterprise segment. These two segments have very different needs, which are reflected in the fundamentally different architectures of the SEPATON and Data Domain products."
Let's examine the facts. Our systems are deployed in the datacenters of many large enterprises. For example, the major financial services firm where I did my last field installation is storing over 5PB across four geographically distributed datacenters. These large enterprise customers clearly see the value in Data Domain's well-designed inline approach that does not slow down backups or restores, enables immediate replication of deduplicated data, and makes the deduplication process transparent to users and applications. To do this in practice is difficult since the process of identifying duplicates inline is inherently a very compute intensive process. WIthout careful thought about how to inline, the resulting design makes inefficient use of CPU, memory and disk resources or just runs too slowly to be effective.
Vendors that cannot successfully navigate these challenges must go to market with post-process deduplication systems. While this may allow them to avoid the hard problems of delivering deduplication with speed and simplicity, the consequences are many. Directly stated, post-process deduplication systems are just like traditional storage systems. They have the same disk I/O bottlenecks as traditional VTLs - they require disproportionately high spindle counts just to land the native data to a disk cache. That data must then be read back from disk and deduplicated before any additional processes, such as replication or verification, can occur.
This last point is critical, as in our experience, replication is the number one enterprise capability that our customers and prospects require in a deduplication storage solution, as it is key to enabling simple, reliable, and cost-effective disk-based DR. In this article from January 2006, announcing the ability to replicate the native data between their VTL's, Sepaton's president/CEO seems to share our belief in the importance of this capability:
"In recent years there have been numerous public accounts of lost or stolen tapes and the resulting corporate pressure to solve data loss. The risks are high - lost revenue and productivity, increase in customer dissatisfaction, fines and penalties and damaged corporate reputations," said Mike Worhach, president and CEO, SEPATON, Inc.
Customers looking for deduplication and replication solution who do their research will learn that Sepaton still does not have any ability to replicate deduplicated data, while our ability to do this is proven across thousands of customers. Different definitions of "enterprise" indeed.
