Nexsan Technologies and FalconStor Software have worked together to deliver a new data deduplication appliance and plan to use channel partners to take on dedupe market leader Data Domain and its new owner, EMC.

Nexsan Tuesday is planning to officially unveil its Nexsan DeDupe SG product line, which combines the company's power-efficient storage appliances with FalconStor's File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) dedupe software.

The DeDupe SG will be sold as a Nexsan-branded appliance whose software launches with the FalconStor brand, said Bob Woolery, senior vice president of marketing at Nexsan.

Deduplication, also called "dedupe," removes duplicate information as data is stored, backed up or archived. It can be done at the file level, where duplicate files are replaced with a marker pointing to one copy of the file, and/or at the subfile or byte level, where duplicate bytes of data are removed and replaced by pointers, resulting in a significant decrease in storage capacity requirements.

The timing of the release of the DeDupe SG, after months of joint development and only weeks after EMC beat out NetApp for Data Domain, worked out well for Nexsan and FalconStor, Woolery said.

"There's a lot of market hype about dedupe," he said. "The dedupe market is huge, and it's been validated by EMC's and NetApp's bidding war."

EMC on July 8 entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Data Domain for $2.1 billion.

The DeDupe SG comes in multiple versions, varying in raw capacity from 4 Tbytes to 52 Tbytes, Woolery said. Assuming a conservative dedupe ratio of 20:1, business users of the appliances could back up and restore between 80 Tbytes and 1,040 Tbytes of data, he said.

The DeDupe SG offers higher backup performance and larger capacities than the corresponding Data Domain models, said Fadi Albatal, director of product marketing at FalconStor.

It accomplishes this by letting host servers do the full backup before the start of the dedupe process, which once started runs in the background, Albatal said. Data Domain appliances feature inline processing, which Albatal said means that the deduplication process is done during the backup process.

The dedupe process can be set to happen either during the backup process or once the backup is complete, Albatal said. The new appliance also allows WAN-based block-level dedupe, which means that data backups from multiple sites are deduped as those backups are sent to a central site for management to make sure there is no duplicate data from multiple sites, he said.

A unique feature of the DeDupe SG is the integration between the FalconStor software and Nexsan's AutoMAID power-saving technology. Under AutoMAID, hard drives are slowed down when not required in order to save power requirements from between 20 percent and 60 percent, compared to the drives running at full speed.

However, the drives are not turned off, but instead run at one of three different speeds as determined by the user based on how quickly stored data needs to be recovered, Albatal said.

The combination of Nexsan and FalconStor is a great fit for the channel, especially partners looking for a way to compete against EMC and Data Domain, said Greg Knieriemen, vice president of marketing at Chi, a Cleveland, Ohio-based solution provider and partner with both Nexsan and FalconStor.

"They're going right after Data Domain, which is a good target for both companies," Knieriemen said. "The timing is right,"

There is a lot of confusion in the market about what Data Domain will look like as a part of EMC, a situation that plays right into Nexsan's hands, Knieriemen said.

"The combined teams of EMC and Data Domain, once the Nexsan-FalconStor product is announced, will quickly go after their new competition," he said. "It's in their DNA. And they will inadvertently raise awareness for both Nexsan and FalconStor."

List prices for the DeDupe SG range from $49,000 for a 4-Tbyte model to $300,000 for a 52-Tbyte model.