April 2009 Entries
Don't Buy Storage - let us show you why - April 13, 2009
Orlando Florida -- Explosive data growth, combined with the proliferation of disparate storage management tools and technologies, has created a significant challenge for IT managers tasked with provisioning and maintaining multi-vendor storage environments. As the market leader in storage management, Symantec can help your organization take control of storage growth. Our advanced solutions provide end-to-end visibility, reporting, and manageability of storage environments, enabling the reclamation of unused or wasted storage space to defer costly storage hardware purchases and reduce administration costs. In addition, you can expect improved data access via availability, performance, and security enhancements.
Challenges
IT managers today must master a difficult balancing act: manage fast-growing data storage, achieve user and application performance level needs, and stay within budget. And, yet, while rapid data growth is increasing storage expenditures, the average data center utilizes only 62 percent of its available storage. The lack of visibility and manageability is preventing enterprises from fully exploiting their assets. By reclaiming unused capacity, vast amounts of expensive, high-performance storage capacity can be made available for reuse, deferring the need to purchase additional high-end devices.
Solutions
Sencilo Solution consultants can implement solutions that optimize storage resources to suit your environment, regardless of storage topology, operating environment, or storage hardware. Our phased approach to storage optimization includes: discovery/visualization, storage reporting, storage reclamation, data classification, and policy/process automation. Sencilo’s industry-standard technologies such as storage virtualization, RAID, and others can be configured to maximize disk utilization and accommodate specific environments such as databases or clustered file systems. In addition, our consultants can tune and optimize I/O performance and also determine where database performance hotspots exist by mapping database objects through to the backend storage devices. They can also configure volume or file system level snapshots for database cloning, fast recovery, or off-host processing.
Why Sencilo Solutions?
Teaming with Sencilo consultants, your IT staff can master the difficult balance of meeting your requirements for storage, user and application performance, and budget constraints. By optimizing storage utilization, you can defer expensive storage purchases and significantly reduce your IT asset costs.
Guaranteed
If our recommandations and services do not reclaim over 50% of your primary storage, you do not pay a dime. That is our promise to you! With hundreds of satified clients, Sencilo is so confident in our solutions we will stand behind this claim, 100%.
For more information please call (407) 265-6293 x1910 or visit us at: http://www.sencilo.com/storage-assessment.php
About Us
Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in Cost Cutting storage, security and managed services solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, Data Domain, EMC, Hitachi, Symantec, HDS, IBM, Commvault, Xiotech and HP. Its technical expertise is known throughout the storage and security industry. Clients include leading corporations, major financial institutions, top universities, government facilities, as well as small to medium size businesses. Sencilo's professional services include consulting, integration, project management, storage virtualization installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.
Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland and Cape Canaveral Green Simpana Offerings Projects: BC DR planning Replication De-Dup De-Dupe iSCSI SAN NAS VMware Security EMC NetApp HP IBM Quantum Compliance VTL Data Domain vs Gartner Magic Quadrant Quadrent LTO Backup Exc Pure Disk NetBackup Networker TSM Commvault BakBone D2D D2D2T compare cloud data deduplication thin provisioning DXi Global Compression DDX virtual tape library Data Reduction SEPATON FALCON compare Celerra CLARiiON Equallogic Dell NS20 NS40 CX4 CX3-20 CX3-40 CX3-80 FAS2050 FAS3050 Xiotech Nexsan Avamar DLD3 1500 D3 Storwiz storage compression data Ocarina Networks A-SIS compare Sepaton infopro BlueArc OnStor Microsoft Unified Storage data protection StorageX Brocade FAQ SSD Solid state disk SANmelody FalconStor tier zero Xiotech ISE nx4 ax4 greenBytes ZFS Sun Top 10 ROBOBak managed services hosting cloud grid Datacore Compellent compellant equallogic lefthand networks don't buy storage stop buying storage itguardian cherub networks Arkeia Network Backup appliance Data Recovery Backup Health IT Healthcare IT Digital Hospital Allscripts
Data Dedupe Market - 2009 will be the year of the shake out - April 3, 2009
Miami Florida -- The wider U.S. economy remains in the dumps, but the companies beating Wall Street estimates or reporting record sales this week have one thing in common: They offer data deduplication for small and medium-sized customers. We see three player either closing it's door or being sold for pennies on the dollar. Last year we saw Data Domain losing market share, some 60% worth to EMC, NetApp, Quantum, HP and other larger firms. We saw Falconstor lose OEM relationships including EMC, IBM and Dell. Exagrid was positioning it's self with Dell only to lose out to Quantum. Yes this is the year of the shake out.
While the hype about data deduplication has been going on for more than a year, it was only last quarter that a real explosion in this market occurred, according to Brian McCarthy CEO and 30 year Storage veteran for Sencilo Solutions. "This market is really just beginning," he said. Users not only needed to see the technology proven in the field, but in many cases also had to wait until older equipment was ready to be replaced. "But it's happening every day, right now."
Earlier in the week, EMC Corp. said that its Avamar data deduplication software and appliance for remote offices led its products in sales growth for the quarter, with adoption up "triple digits" and the appliance's inventory sold out before the quarter's end, far out pacing new customers vs. Data Domain and Exagrid.
Some analysts also credit the entry of vendors like IBM, HP and EMC with driving the data deduplicaton market's growth. "Now that most of the majors have it on their price lists, it's a validated technology, and one I think will go into mainstream use in the next 12 months," said Taneja Group analyst Eric Burgener.
Although not publicly traded, ExaGrid Systems Inc. volunteered this week that its second quarter sales were up 11% compared to the previous quarter and up 4% versus the same quarter last year. Over the past 5 years Exagrid has shipped 190 units, or about what Netapp ships on any given week. We are not seeing Exagrid around this time next year.
Data Domain did not see changes to sales demand this quarter and is not making any adjustments to its forecasts for the next quarter or the full year, Slootman said. But the fact that Data Domain has lost ~60% marketshare over the past 3 years to companies like HP, EMC, IBM and others does not speak well for Slootmanns forecast for 2009.
The three vendors have also announced recent product updates. The latest came from ExaGrid, which is going after the bigger fish in its small and medium-sized customer base with a 50% boost in overall system capacity, from 20 TB to 30 TB. The company also said that its EX Series of systems will now support cross replication among up to nine of its data center locations. Exagrid has not figured out how to scale beyond 30TBs which makes it a SMB only play. Having lost out on OEM deals with HP, IBM and Dell we feel that Exagrid is not going to be a player over the next 6 to 12 months.
Data deduplication reporting features
But what's really piquing user interest is the addition of data deduplication reporting features that will show users their data deduplication ratio and replication status by backup job. This is similar to reporting features already offered by Sepaton, but Sepaton generally sells into larger accounts than ExaGrid.
"The reporting is certainly of interest to us," said Edward Ruffolo, IT director for Miron Construction. The company already uses reports from its CA ArcServe backup product daily. "Now we can match those with daily reports from Sepaton, and that will help us avoid any potential problems with restores."
Sepaton and EMC Avamar also attributed much of their recent success in the data deduplication arena with recently released products, notably the 2100 array and Avamar version 4.0, respectively.
As the market expands, the diversification of product lines has also begun to increase. Data Domain has repackaged its system for use as both nearline NAS and archiving, as well as a backup target. "Mixed use is on the rise," Slootman said. "There are further efficiencies to be gained by consolidating backup and archive storage."
Better integration between data deduplication and other types of products has also probably contributed to the recent boom, Burgener said. "EMC [has integrated] the Avamar technology into the networker client, making it much easier for people to start using it, [since] they don't have to reinstall; they just have to shut down, make a few configuration changes and reboot," he said. We see EMC over taking Data Domain later this quarter.
Competition will only get hotter
Among those companies losing the most market share to data deduplication technologies are makers of tape autoloaders, which used to be the most popular backup media for SMBs. Although it's bringing its newer disk-based backup products to the forefront, Quantum is also among the vendors with a legacy autoloader business and finds itself with its stock hovering in the $1 range. It also finds itself the subject of acquisition talk for EMC. Overland Storage, which recently partnered with Diligent Technologies for its own data dedupe push, also finds its stock in a similar range.
Another company that seems to have been left behind in this increasingly volatile market is FalconStor, whose Single Instance Repository data deduplication product didn't pass muster with its major OEMs -- EMC and IBM -- both of which turned to other partners for data deduplication capability.
It also remains to be seen which way Quantum will go. EMC says it has gotten "excellent feedback" in a few weeks of availability.
Despite Data Domain's promising financials, Wall Street analysts were concerned about how the company will fare with increased competition, especially from titans like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and EMC with huge sales forces. Data Domain has yet to build a channel and the several VARs interviewed in this report stated Data Domain has gone direct so the VARs are no longer selling Data Domains. "It's no longer an option for large vendors to be on the sidelines of this opportunity," Thom acknowledged. But Data Domain has been adding salespeople in preparation for what he called the "ground war" on the company's earnings call, a war in which Data Domain has 150 sales reps vs. 165,000 at IBM, HDS and HP. I am thinking it will be a 100 hour war, akind to Gulf War One.
Coming advances in data deduplication are expected to make the market even hotter. For example, Data Domain and Diligent still haven't released multinode clustered versions of their products, which would allow customers to scale their data dedupe solutions without buying multiple boxes. When that happens, "things will really get interesting," McCarthy said. "When the major players come out with multinode systems, then it becomes a pricing war."
For more information please call (407) 265-6293 or visit us at: http://www.sencilo.com/storage-virtualization.php
About Us
Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in Cost Cutting storage, security and managed services solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, Data Domain, EMC, Hitachi, Symantec, HDS, IBM, Commvault, Xiotech and HP. Its technical expertise is known throughout the storage and security industry. Clients include leading corporations, major financial institutions, top universities, government facilities, as well as small to medium size businesses. Sencilo's professional services include consulting, integration, project management, storage virtualization installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.
Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland and Cape Canaveral Green Simpana Offerings Projects: BC DR planning Replication De-Dup De-Dupe iSCSI SAN NAS VMware Security EMC NetApp HP IBM Quantum Compliance VTL Data Domain vs Gartner Magic Quadrant Quadrent LTO Backup Exc Pure Disk NetBackup Networker TSM Commvault BakBone D2D D2D2T compare cloud data deduplication thin provisioning DXi Global Compression DDX virtual tape library Data Reduction SEPATON FALCON compare Celerra CLARiiON Equallogic Dell NS20 NS40 CX4 CX3-20 CX3-40 CX3-80 FAS2050 FAS3050 Xiotech Nexsan Avamar DLD3 1500 D3 Storwiz storage compression data Ocarina Networks A-SIS compare Sepaton infopro BlueArc OnStor Microsoft Unified Storage data protection StorageX Brocade FAQ SSD Solid state disk SANmelody FalconStor tier zero Xiotech ISE nx4 ax4 greenBytes ZFS Sun Top 10 ROBOBak managed services hosting cloud grid Datacore Compellent compellant equallogic lefthand networks don't buy storage stop buying storage itguardian cherub networks Arkeia Network Backup appliance Data Recovery Backup Health IT Healthcare IT Digital Hospital Allscripts
