Customers using NetApp and others instead of overpriced Celerra have enjoyed thin provisioning of systems and therefore deduplicated disk and backup for quite a while now.

This is EMC being dragged forward by their customers and the competition, still years behind.

Thin provisioning and de-duplication are different.

Netapp have only picked de-dupe up recently – check the registers article here:

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/05/15/netapp_releases_standalone_asis/

EMC acquired Avamar ages ago.

Given this who do you think has the better product....? ummm let me think about that for all of 2 seconds...