Data De-duplication, one of the hottest emerging segments within the enterprise storage and data-protection industry, is fast evolving from being just a back up solution to become a feature of a broader data-protection offering.
Data Domain, one of the leaders in data de-duplication, views the technology today as a “storage fundamental” that has extended its use beyond backup and recovery to consolidation support for backup, archiving and other nearline applications.
“A consensus is now emerging that for many other non-backup applications, de-duplication will be extremely meaningful as well,” said CK Chan, Data Domain’s Senior Area Director of Asia Sales in an interview with SDA Asia.
The Santa Clara, California based organisation noted that its data de-duplication solutions, which were initially developed for backup are now being deployed more broadly as a storage tier including nearline file storage, backup, disaster recovery and long term retention of enterprise data for reference, litigation support and regulatory compliance.
Research done by the 451 Group, a technology-industry analyst company has forecasted that data de-duplication is set to become a 1 billion dollar market by 2009—a target that is attainable given that this technology has broad appeal across vertical markets and among organisations of various sizes.
In order to tap into this increasingly lucrative market, Data Domian introduced its nearline storage solutions some six months back.
David Schneider, vice president of Worldwide Sales at Data Domain, told SDA Asia that the market trend today is such that 60 % of organisations are using data de-duplication for nearline and backup whilst the remaining 40% are using it for nearline only. Email and windows file serving are the top two areas where this technology is primarily used.
In the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, which Data Domain has been operating out of since July 2007, CK Chan sees traction for its solutions in key markets such as, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and India and predominant success in industries such as Telcos and the Financials.
APAC contributed to 7 % of Data Domains total revenue for 2007, a number which is significantly small when compared to the 21% and 72% it reaped from the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and North America respectively in the same year.
Data Domain’s products include a DDX Array Series, Appliance Series and Gateway Series and it calls companies such as Motorola, Ericsson, TimeWarner, Hershey’s, At&T, Honeywell, Yahoo! Japan and Microsoft as customers, amongst many others.
CK Chan told SDA Asia that the organisation plans to play more aggressively in the APAC market in the coming year. It already has some 20 employees in the region spread across its offices in Singapore, India, Korea, China and Taiwan. The company, which competes against other storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp, aims to increase its employee headcount two folds to 40 and expand operations to Hong Kong and Malaysia in the near future.
“In Asia, we are establishing ourselves as the leader quickly by putting up a distribution strategy and sales execution to cover major and emerging markets,” said CK Chan.
“In 2008, we will continue to scale and grow the business with focused channel partners and technology partners in realizing the fundamental shift in the way storage systems are deployed in enterprises with deduplication.” |
