Symantec CEO: EMC Felt They Were Coming Up Short In Data Deduplication

"I think EMC probably felt that what they currently had in that area (deduplication) wasn't sufficient," said Salem in an interview Tuesday at the VAR500 conference, a gathering of the biggest and most successful solution providers at New York's Marriott Downtown in the heart of Wall Street.

EMC shined the spotlight on the importance of deduplication technology on Monday when it made a move to trump archrival NetApp's plan to buy Data Domain with an offer sweetening the deal by 20 percent. EMC's offer to acquire Data Domain is for $30 per share in a deal worth about $1.8 billion. That is about 20 percent over the $1.5 billion offered for Data Domain last month by NetApp.

Lost in the tussle is the fact that Symantec with its NetBackup product has long been considered a technology leader in data deduplication and backup. In fact, a number of the data deduplication providers, including Data Domain itself, rely on Symantec's NetBackup engine as the "way to figure out what needs to be deduped," Salem said.

Data Domain relies on Symantec NetBackup's Open Storage Option (OST) standard. "If you look at what Data Domain does is they write to the OST Symantec interface so they can figure out what to dedupe," Salem said.

"We absolutely compete with everybody in the dedupe space but we also partner with folks who see our NetBackup engine as the way to figure out what needs to be deduped," he said.

The intense technology debate around deduplication technology is not esoteric given the large amount of money that can be saved by effectively eliminating duplicate copies.

Symantec's data deduplication technology is "block level and done at the source," said Salem, who gave a keynote presentation at the VAR500 event. "Those are the two big differentiators for us. We can do it in the data center, but we also have the technology block level at the source."

"The block level deduplication is important. If you don't do block level you won't get the 50- to-100-to-1 dedupe (effectively saving the data once vs. 50 or 100 times based on the number of copies of the data stored on systems)," said Salem.

Many companies are doing deduplication at the "presentation level" rather than the block level, Salem explained. "The presentation level isn't nearly enough," he said. "We are seeing some folks getting 50 to 1 or 100 to 1 in dedupe."

Symantec also has a key advantage in providing host-level data deduplication, Salem said. That's critical because it allows the customer to "dedupe where the data is and then transfer it over the wire into the data center," he said.

"Our goal is to help our customers commoditize their infrastructure," Salem said. "I don't care if you buy disk from EMC or NetApp or Hitachi or IBM. My goal is: You pick. NetBackup figures out what you need to back up, and you pick what you want to back up to."

The commoditization of infrastructure call is resonating with CIOs, said Salem, because it means "less cost and no lock-in to a vendor."