Storage at rest de-duplication has been a growing point of interest for most IT staffs over the last year or so, just because de-duplication allows you to purchase less hardware over time, and if that hardware is a big old storage array sucking a ton of power and costing a not-insignificant amount to install and maintain, well, it’s appealing.

Most of the recent buzz has been about primary storage de-duplication, but that is merely a case of where the market is. Backup de-duplication has existed for a good long while, and secondary storage de-duplication is not new. Only recently have people decided that at-rest de-dupe was stable enough to give it a go on their primary storage – where all the most important and/or active information is kept. I don’t think I’d call it a “movement” yet, but it does seem that the market’s resistance to anything that obfuscates data storage is eroding at a rapid rate due to the cost of the hardware (and attendant maintenance) to keep up with storage growth.

Ocarina Networks is one of a handful of vendors that was dealing with de-duplication abstracted from the tier. They didn’t care what tier you were de-duplicating, only that they were very good at it. They’ve been  working hard to get your attention, and failing that to get the attention of resellers/OEMs. This move shows that they managed to receive that attention. And a good thing too, since this market is going to be over-run by big names providing de-duplication directly. Even though I think that de-duplication falls into the category of technologies you want outside of your storage arrays so that you can apply it across vendors and tiers, we’ve all seen that similar functionality, if offered by the big names, ceases to exist as a stand-alone market, just through market attrition.

Dell is a provider of a variety of storage systems, and while you don’t think of them when you think HP/EMC/NetApp/IBM/HDS (when did The Big Three become The Big Five?), they certainly move a lot of disk. From entry level NAS devices to high-end iSCSI, they’re out there with their own products, and reselling the likes of EMC for things they don’t directly offer of their own (or OEM, but these days even IBM OEMs some storage boxes). At a minimum, Dell is a force in the storage market, I think of them more as “the next generation” because they’re poised to take advantage of the move to IP storage, while not invested in FC in any great depth.

The merger of these two companies makes for some interesting possibilities. Much like when Dell bought EqualLogic, it doesn’t seem like a perfect fit, but the potential for a merged future that betters Dell’s place in the business market exists. It is no longer just massive companies with millions of servers that are suffering from storage expense overload, lots of smaller organizations are feeling the pinch of a never-ending stream of unstructured data. From the perspective that most of this unstructured data is driving the business, that’s good. From the perspective of the costs to store this data, that’s bad. Dell should find good resonance with its customer base, and hopefully enough of a market to make this purchase worthwhile (for the record, I have no idea if EqualLogic has worked out for Dell as a valuable purchase, but I’ve been a fan of EqualLogic since the early days, and presume that they kept the momentum going under the aegis of Dell).

The question I – and presumably many others – have is “will Dell keep this open to all vendors?” They are in a unique position to do so, they resell other vendors’ gear, they sell their own, their focus is not on totally dominating the storage market with the newest, snazziest, shiniest boxes, but rather on giving their customer base an array of options that suit their needs within the price bounds of the market segment they’re selling to (I know that you can buy storage from them for $3000, and that some storage from them is more than $50,000 – and that’s all aimed at the SMB market). They have the relationships to keep Ocarina free of the fetters of single-vendorism, and Ocarina has contracts that would make it one of the top choices for de-dupe. The only question is what Dell’s management was thinking when they signed the contract. It would be a valid road for them to pursue to attempt to fold Ocarina into their existing offerings and focus it primarily or even solely on Dell storage products… If they wanted to be a storage vendor. My gut says probably not, and I hope that this time my gut is right. They have a lot more business than just storage, so another valid path for them to take is to offer the Ocarina product for any certified storage. IMO that would be the best option, they can then sell it to their existing and future customers without constraint.

Dave Raffo over at SearchStorage has a pretty good listing of the relationships this purchase impacts and what the relationships entail. It will be interesting to see how Dell handles each of them.

And in that second scenario, we’d all win. If you don’t need de-duplication, you can buy from whomever, if you do need de-duplication, you can buy Ocarina devices from Dell, get their world-class support, and get your storage… From whomever. In my opinion that would be a win for everyone.

Note: Dell is a business partner of F5 (as are all of the other vendors mentioned). While I have not talked to anyone at Dell or Ocarina leading up to to writing this blog, I thought it only fair to mention our relationship.

And F5 currently has no horse in this race, we don’t make storage, our de-dupe (via WOM and EDGE Gateway) is on-the-fly and complimentary to that done by Ocarina, and we don’t sell servers. This blog simply reflects my interest in the changing storage market space and not any kind of official F5 position on the topic. If we even have one.

Related Articles and Blogs

• Dell-Ocarina deal will alter landscape of primary storage deduplication
• Data dedupe technology helps curb virtual server sprawl
• Expanding Role of Data Deduplication
• The Reality of Primary Storage Deduplication