Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/05/dells_two_dedupe_technologies/
Dell's sticks with dual de-dupe strategy
Thinks two heads are better than one
Posted in Storage, 5th November 2008 11:06 GMT
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Dell is going to have two de-duplication technologies, not a single de-duplication architecture across its products,
On Monday it announced (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/03/dell_uses_quantum_dedupe/) a single, block-level de-duplication architecture to be applied across its PowerVault, EqualLogic and Dell/EMC storage arrays next year. The technology is based on licensed intellectual property from Quantum.
This followed its PowerVault DL2000 announcement (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/07/dell_dl2000_d2d_appliance/) where one option included the use of CommVault Simpana software with file-level de-duplication, also known as single-instancing. This is less efficient at removing redundancy in files than block-level de-duplication.
CommVault will add block-level de-duplication next year also. Thus Dell, which aims for simplification, will have two incompatible de-duplication technologies in use.
A Dell spokesperson stated: "[This] is intended to be a 'single architecture across different size and capacity target-based de-dupe solutions', not across DL2000. In other words we would use the same de-dupe SW stack from SMB to enterprise on our target-based de-dupe solutions. [This] drives the compatibility and replication capability of the product line.
"We will continue to work with CommVault on advances for the DL2000 platform. The DL2000 is a new product that is intended as an integrated backup appliance for SMBs and happens to include de-dupe functionality."
Although the DL2000 is branded as a PowerVault DL2000 product (http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/disk-backup?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&~ck=bt), in this situation it's not being treated as a PowerVault product.
Competitor HP has two de-duplication technologies (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/23/hp_duplicates_deduplication/), one for enterprise customers and one for small/medium enterprises.
In its de-duplication architecture release Dell stated: "Dell is taking a common architecture approach to its de-duplication strategy." That now seems to be an over-statement. The company is saying that the coming Quantum-based de-dupe is for customers needing to replicate and de-duplicate data across multiple sites, perhaps from departments or branch offices to the data center. The DL2000 de-dupe appliance is for single offices with limited IT support, implying it is not for replicating data between offices.
However, the Simpana DL2000 can also replicate data between offices (http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/storage-dl2000-commvault?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd) leading to the situation that, where a small business has a couple of offices, there will be two incompatible backup to disk and de-duplication products in Dell's product line. ®