Backup is not Dead

While NetApp's tape augmentation market has declined Data Domain and Avamar's *tape replacement* business grew 50% year over year in the last quarter alone and has been up every quarter.

Now that they're not getting any of that action it's back to the old NetApp chestnut that "Backup is Dead".

No, no. Only their VTL is dead. Backup and Recovery is as important as ever.

It's AlacriTUS, not Alacritech

2 different companies. NTAP purchased Alacritus.

Alacritech is still a separate company making TCP offload engines.

Agreed - VTL is not a big deal

7 years ago VTL was a big deal because you wanted a Virtual Tape Library to 'pretend' to be a real one. You got performance improvements, replication, etc, and most importantly easy integration because this disk thingy looked & smelt like a tape library. Heck, it even came with tape library personalities. Fast forward 7 years and all the decent backup products support IP or FC attached disk pools. Thus, you don't need all that tape library emulation and even if you DO want a real tape (long term archive, etc) you can easily duplicate from your disk pool to tape. So, NTAP has a pretty good de-duper on it's IP storage and thus you could argue that neither it (nor anyone else) really needs VTL.

Now, the problem I see is that NTAP has a post process engine in its primary filesystem and DataDomain has real time in its secondary filesystem. RT is a much easier sell these days, now that performance is good. But Sun's expected release of RT de-dupe in AmberRoad is a big deal to DataDomain and NTAP: it'll be the first RT de-dupe in a primary filesystem. Lets see how they respond to that.

The de-dupe market is certainly hotting up, but forget the VTL end of it. It's the fag end.

Good move

Netapp's VTL was never a compelling product. I've griped to NetApp guys before that the real jewel was SnapVault (which already blends dedupe, archiving, replication) and they should invest in rounding that out as a complete ILM solution.