Opinion

posted on 13 May 2008 11:33

Yesterday EMC made some comments about Data Domain's competitive poisitioning of its new DD690 product versus EMC Avamar's RAIN Grid.

Brian Biles, Data Domain's Product Management VP, has penned an answer to them, saying: "EMC's Avamar group seems to be getting defensive about something in Data Domain's DD690 announcement, but we're not sure what it is, in these comments.

"Data Domain's press release on the DD690 said that the DD690 has the highest performance single-steam inline dedupe throughput in the industry at 600 GB/hour. EMC Avamar, in the reaction above, says they get 10GB/hour per client system (2.7 MB/sec.) It sounds like we can agree that the DD690, per stream, is a different category of product from EMC Avamar because a client stream to Data Domain can go 60 times faster.

"In the DD690 press release, Data Domain made the observation that the single-stream criterion is most critical in the datacenter when it comes to databases. For example, Oracle RMAN output will create a new file every day, and in the case of either Avamar or Data Domain, this must be processed as a single stream. They also tend to be big files. Going faster will generally be better to meet a backup window.

"It's curious to note some of the other rumors also available on Blocks and Files, i.e. http://blocksandfiles.com/article/5123. If EMC Avamar's logic in their comments were truly compelling, Avamar would sell universally and this new rumor would make no sense. Instead, it sounds like EMC won't have one product that fits many markets - one EMC size won't fit all. At least Avamar won't fit all. There are obviously various use cases that don't favor Avamar, and our experience is that large files (like databases) in datacenters is one of them.

"Similarly, when copying to tape, a single stream of information needs to be fed to the tape drive to keep it from "shoe-shining," allowing it to deliver its rated speeds without hitting buffering problems. Here again, faster is better. How fast can Avamar stream a single image to tape?

"Finally, there is a lot of interesting technology in the backup software market. Avamar seems to be taking credit for all of it, though we suspect IBM, Symantec and CommVault advocates might dispute the notion that Avamar has some kind of franchise on incrementals-forever backup policies. Even when you do incrementals, you need the data transmission to be fast enough, you'll want minimum client impact, and you'll want it to copy to tape quickly. Users should make sure they ask the right questions."

^{[Formatted by B&F staff.]}