Selling your $1.5 Billion Soul for 14 TBs of Scalability.
So, it looks like Data Domain has seen the light at the end of the tunnel. A tunnel that was beginning to close in on them. How do you grow a one technology, point solution storage company into a billion dollar storage company? You don’t! You sell it – for $1.5 billion!
Not a bad exit for the team over at DDUP. Congrats to the management team and their shareholders! The bigger question really falls to NTAP. You did what?
Thank you for validating outright that in-line deduplication is a must have technology in a storage company’s portfolio. I guess the customers who received the freebie from NTAP (ASIS) really did get what they paid for! Now what will they have to buy in the future? Another dedupe technology that doesn’t scale much better than what NTAP had in the first place (30 TB vs. 16 TB)? How will NTAP enterprise customers manage PBs of data? With hundreds of DDUP boxes? Replacing one point technology with another shiny new point technology doesn’t build a better solution.
It’s like when an aging NBA franchise acquires a young point guard. They often end up with:
- An expensive, management intensive, star quality point solution
vs.
- A market demanded “Big Man” – scalability, simplicity and cost efficiency.
So, to DDUP I say congrats. To NTAP, good luck!