News

posted on 04 August 2008 12:37

Deduplication vendor Data Domain is duplicating application vendor partnerships to enhance its nearline storage appeal by announcing new partnerships.

Nearline storage is that somewhat fuzzy class of online storage between tier 1 performance-centric arrays and tier 3 data protection and preservation arrays for online applications such as data backup, archiving and compliance. Tier 2 nearline arrays will be capacity-centric and could store unstructured or semi-structured files and other reference-type data. Often such arrays may well be used in tier 3 applications since they need to be capacity-centric as well.

Data Domain deduplicates the data stored in its arrays as it arrives to achieve a 20:1 effective reduction in the stored data volume or thereabouts, depending upon the amount of redundancy in the data.

The new partnerships include:-

- Mimosa Nearpoint,
- AXS-One Compliance Platform,
- F5 Networks Acopia ARX File Virtualisation devices,
- Brocade File Management Engine (FME),
- DataGlobal Enterprise Resource Suite (ERS),
- ARKIVIO auto-stor,
- Kazeon Information Server.

The idea is to minimise the space and storage capacity required for disk-based archives, while reducing the amount of time spent searching, indexing and recovering files from archived data sets. These latest partners join a list of previously announced ones such as CommVault, EMC, Symantec, and Atempo.

EMC, of course, has its own de-duplicating products so the depth of its partnership with Data Domain is somewhat shallower than the others. There was no supporting quote from an EMC source in Data Domain's announcement alhough there was one from each of the other vendors.

Most of the new partners reckon that storing the information they variously capture, organise and index on Data Domain arrays will bring substantial capacity efficiencies and enable their customers to store much more data than before.

For example, Marie-Charlotte Patterson, VP for Product Management and Corporate Marketing at AXS-One, said: “We are very pleased with the near-line de-duplication results that we have achieved and are confident of the capacity optimisation for long-term data storage this can offer our enterprise customers."

Scott Whitney, Product Management VP at Mimosa Systems, said: “We are excited to leverage Data Domain’s deduplication technologies to improve storage efficiencies for content being managed by the Mimosa NearPoint archive as the repository of record to expedite eDiscovery and automate the recovery of Microsoft Exchange."

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}