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NetApp Buys Data Domain

NetApp is making a serious move into the disk backup and disk archive market, laying $1.5 billion on the table to acquire Data Domain. If you are a regular reader of my blog on Byte and Switch you know that in general I am skeptical of most technology acquisitions, but this one may be an exception. It has the potential to give NetApp an incredible advantage in the environment -- they just have to manage the integration.

NetApp's Responsibility -- Do no harm, but do something

NetApp of course positions this as non-disruptive to their current offerings. Really it is too soon to tell what will happen and to some extent not fair for us to expect NetApp have all the answers. What we have to hope is that NetApp lets Data Domain be Data Domain and where Data Domain is a better fit, have the NetApp products step out of the way, at least until the Data Domain technology can be integrated in.

The best advice is to let Data Domain run as a stand alone entity for a very long period of time and then slowly in the background pull some of the Data Domain technology into the traditional NetApp products.

Deduplication is not a feature -- its a market.

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