Summary
Dell seems to take the rolling ball on deduplication technology with both services and solutions. It illustrates the key strategy aspect of this technology both for a financial perspective and a pure IT point of view. Dell wishes to come back in user mind and be considered, again, as a key trusted partner in that space. Partnership with CommVault, one of the few gems and pure data protection ISV players, is also a key point here.
Analysis
Dell's and Michael's mission is to be considered and to come back in end-user minds quickly especially in one of the faster ROI domain in IT technology: data redundancy elimination. Dedup is just a technology dedicated for data at rest and potentially data in motion. This dedup concept for secondary storage made some time to be adopted by end-users and many vendors suffered for market adoption. We can easily list now more than 40 players in that segment which is just a sub-storage area.
Today, users need that commonality factoring for all storage flavors especially primary data units. For primary or production data, technology covers more reduction, compression and single instance storage and other players entered that market. It means that potentials mergers and acquisitions will happen soon.
What is pretty strange is that Dell already has Overland REO VTL and Quantum DXi products in his catalog with already dedup engine. Now Dell chooses to offer DL2000 with one of the best storage and data mangement software from CommVault, Simpana 8, a very good suite of data services. Dell has to take the train for that adoption and the fact that they offer a DeDup consulting service is also a key aspect to assess and recommend the right solution from Dell. Dell demonstrates to the market that DeDup expertise is now in house.
Second interesting point is that users need primary dedup as they agreed on secondary effects and results. We wait and hope some potential announcements from Dell and others on primary storage especially block and NAS flavors.
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
