The battle over data deduplication

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Now that the frozen economy is starting to thaw, I have been traveling like crazy this month. So far, I have been to Rochester, MN, Los Angeles and San Diego, CA, and now currently in Austin, TX. On the plus side, I was able to enjoy the [Fourth of July] holiday weekend on the beaches of San Diego.

(If you have not been to California beaches lately, here's a quick [video] reminder)

So the big news this week is that the auction over Data Domain is over, and EMC's bid finally won over NetApp. Both NetApp and EMC have data deduplication capabilities in their existing product lines, but neither could compete against IBM's TS7650G ProtecTIER Data Deduplication gateway and TS7650 ProtecTIER appliances, and so were hell-bent to buy Data Domain for large amounts. The final price agreed upon was over two billion US dollars for Data Domain.

For the most part, Data Domain's products are targeted towards small and medium sized businesses, whereas IBM's TS7650 and TS7650G products targets medium and larger sized enterprises.So now that EMC has a viable data deduplication solution, it looks like it will be yet another IBM-vs-EMC debate going forward.

technorati tags: IBM, TS7650G, TS7650, deduplication, ProtecTIER, NetApp, EMC, Data Domain, Audrina Patridge, Teriyaki burger