Storage Monkeys

CLOUD FAIL #1: This would be funny if it weren't such a data disaster: According to multiple news reports, an HDS SAN upgrade at Danger, the Microsoft-owned subsidiary that makes the Sidekick, went bad and it appears that the emails, photos, calendars, photos and contacts of Sidekick owners is lost. How data is COMPLETELY lost on a SAN is beyond me. Sure, some moron may have skipped his Data Center 101 class and not setup a backup...  but do you realize how many things have to go wrong for a complete system failure to happen without a major physical disaster? While the "told ya so" techies flex their muscles on this issue, there is certainly more to this story then we know now.

It's official - EMC's bid of $2.1 billion beat out NetApp... but don't count out NetApp just yet.

EMC paid a large premium for a narrow segment of the storage market - Data Domain's annual sales is around $300 million. Even if Data Domain sales double in the next two years, it will be awhile before the profits of those sales offset the cost. In the end, EMC will make it work.

NetApp's acquisition of Data Domain is interesting on a number of levels.

NetApp has always viewed Data Domain as a competitor in dedupe but rather than fight the battle, their strategy was to give it away for free as a feature. Now with the $1.5 billion acquisition, all of a sudden dedupe is a revenue generator. Are NetApp customers who are deduping primary storage for free now going to pay a premium to dedupe backup data?

Reposted from the original Storage Monkeys blog last week

According to Chris Mellor this morning, EMC is giving Quantum a “sorely-needed $100m financial lifeline” to help manage the debt that it incurred when it acquired ADIC in 2006. For some, the arrangement appears to strengthen the relationship between the two companies and signals that EMC is deeply committed to Quantum for their DXi deduplication technology which is used in combination with FalconStor’s Virtual Tape Library software for EMC’s own branded disk libraries.