News

posted on 18 April 2008 20:17

Data deduplication vendor Data Domain has joined the SNIA which has set up a data deduplication special interest group.

The SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) defines its role as that of an 'industry catalyst for the development of storage solution specifications and technologies, global standards, and storage education.' It is fundamentally a trade association for vendors of networked storage products that also tries to develop standards such as the System Management Interface Standard (SMI-S) for storage systems management. It also carries out a valuable storage networking education role.

Data Domain is a leading supplier of data de-duplication storage products which remove sub-file-level redundancies from data and effectively compress it to a tenth or twentieth or greater fraction of its original size and is very popular in backup applications where a great deal of redundancy is found.

It has now joined the SNIA which has a data deduplication and space reduction (DDSR) special interest group. The usual SNIA initiative area is repesented by a working group and the data management forum (DMF), of which the deduplication SIG is part, has three working groups:-

1. Data Protection (in which Data Domain is active),
2. Information Lifecycle Management,
3. Long-term Archive and Compliance Storage

It is probably that there is little or no opportunity or need to set data deduplication standards that precludes the setting up of a working group for the topic. For example, the idea that one deduplication vendor's system could send deduped data to another vendor's system which could recognise and deal with it is risible.

The founder members of the data deduplication SIG are NetApp and EMC, who provide the co-chairs, Symantec, UBS AG and Data Domain. This is odd in that the SIG's mission statement is dated November 16, 2007, yet Data Domain's joining of the SNIA has only just been announced - six months later.

Perhaps there was a problem in finding a prominent enough role for Data Domain in the SNIA when EMC and NetApp were already co-chairing the deduplication SIG. The Data Domain announcement says that one its employees, Devin Hamilton, a principal systems engineer, is co-chairman of SNIA's DMF Data Protection Initiative. Possibly we can see a quid pro quo here.

The SIG is inviting other vendors to join and potential members include Assigra, IBM/Diligent, FalconStor, Quantum. Riverbed and Sepaton. HDS, HP and Sun are prominent deduplication OEMs/resellers and might be interested as well.

The SIG's mission statement is: "The SNIA DDSR SIG is dedicated to advancing space reduction in all networked storage technologies." It will seek to identify and promulgate best practices.

By using the term 'space reduction' it makes itself open to having data compression vendors join in.

Data Domain states it is 'participating in advancing market adoption of deduplication technology and is educating end-users regarding its ROI and related best practices.'

Devin Hamilton said: "As a technology, Data Deduplication holds out so many opportunities for the simplification of storage processes and data management. Still, best practices and ongoing education will be necessary to ensure that its promise is fully realized by the end user community. We look forward to actively contributing to (the) SNIA's efforts."

^{[Chris Mellor.]}