I read David West's blog- the VP of Marketing for CommVault - and I was surprised at his position on Data Domain. It was pretty negative and very FUD-like. Additionally, there are a large number of joint Data Domain and CommVault customers - and they are technology partners (says so on CommVault's website even).
What most vendors don't get is that attacking another vendor also means that you are indirectly attacking the IT professional that selected that solution as well. This type of behavior is pretty common but in this case many of those are already CommVault customers. In fact, I had a conversation with one CommVault customer recently, Orrin Anderson of Utah State University, and it was at a CommVault event where he got turned on to Data Domain:
"We use the CommVault back-up system, and I was at CommVault training in California and asked the other IT professionals what they were doing. About 75% of them were using Data Domain boxes, whether it be a gateway or a full box. Just seeing that 75% of them were using and were happy with the box, really made us look at Data Domain."
Based on the above, a large number of customers (75% at this event) are already using Data Domain with CommVault. Additionally, these CommVault customers are recommending Data Domain to other CommVault customers.
Let's break down some of what David said:
David's position is that Data Domain has been telling the world that tape sucks and he disagrees. In actuality think that Data Domain is preaching to the choir - no one knows better than IT folks the challenges of tape. For many people - tape does suck. That isn't a startling revelation and it is not an outrageous view point.
David's thesis is that tape will continue to play a useful role in the data center. For many this will be the case - but there are many others that are moving away from tape or minimizing its use. Here is a quote from another Data Domain customer, Michael Passe, Storage Architect for Beth Israel Hospital on tape:
"Mainly we were having a lot of problems with the management overhead of tape. Tape is a very mechanical construct with tapes getting stuck in drives. It made sense to get something more automated and RAID protected. It was fairly easy for us to figure out that tapes needed to go."
Another Data Domain customer, Bryan Wilken, VP of IT for Bank Midwest said the following:
"We have completely stopped using tapes in all but one of our systems, and we’ll have that on the Data Domain in the next few weeks here. The bank now has a more robust and fault-tolerant back-up system. It runs automatically every night and it doesn’t require the need of employees to change tapes and take them home. We’re also seeing a 23-to-1 compression ratio, or de-duplication. And restores have been handled quickly and effectively by the IT department. We no longer have to wait to have tapes either brought back in or reloaded and reread before we can restore data."
These are two data points that are representative of a growing mindset that is based on real pain being felt and a way to solve it - in all of these cases that way is Data Domain.
David West then proceeds to make the same arguments that other backup software vendors have made unsuccessfully against Data Domain over the years - the market continues to embrace the Data Domain approach and for good reasons. Going back to Michael Passe, he looked at backup software and decided to go with Data Domain - even though both EMC and Symantec - two of his existing vendors - tried to sell him their backup software dedupe solutions. Michael states that he chose Data Domain because "...we really liked the appliance model that Data Domain presented. They understand the engineering of the box."
David also brings up some potential recovery performance problem that seems disingenuous and is really vendor FUD. Data Domain has thousands and thousands of customers that are using their solution. Additionally, Data Domain products have been in the market for years. There is no hidden major flaw in terms of recovery or data integrity - otherwise it would have been uncovered long before now by the very customers that use it.
CommVault (and David) are clearly leveraging what they consider to be a major differentiator - the ability to backup and dedupe onto tape. In so doing they are claiming advantages over Data Domain - focusing on a unique CommVault capability. This is again no surprise and common in the industry. But there also has to be value that provides a real "aha" moment to customers in regards to that capability and trying to force it rarely, if ever, succeeds.
The value of dedupe on tape is questionable - since tape is already pretty cheap without it. Questions are raised - how are data sets being backed up over lots of different tape drives impacted by dedupe? What if one of those tapes gets corrupted or lost? How do you recover? This is already an issue without dedupe - does backup-based dedupe create additional challenges? I also want to know about vendor lock-in and what happens if you want to move away from that vendor? Does it mean you always have to keep a CommVault server around? Furthermore, dedupe on tape doesn't solve the major issues created by tape in the first place - including tape management, mechanical problems and recovery reliability.
Thankfully for the marketplace there is always more than one approach and customers will evaluate and determine what method works for them. At this point in storage game the target side is clearly winning. Some customers may want to go the backup software route. Many, many others choose Data Domain because they don't want to rip and replace their existing backup software, they often have multiple backup software solutions so using a single target is just easier and more effective, they don't like the idea of using the backup or host servers to be running the dedupe process, support is easy and straightforward with Data Domain, they can use Data Domain to perform remote replication to DR sites, they case use RMAN for database backup and recovery natively with Data Domain, and the list goes on. One customer told me that Data Domain supporting AS400 was icing on the cake for them. These are the things that end users tell me why they didn't go down the backup software dedupe path.
The good news is that Data Domain and CommVault are still a good combination as many IT professionals can attest to and those joint customers actually made a smart choice.
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