By Warren Smith,  StorageWorks Competitive Intelligence Manager

"Every fight is a food fight when you're a cannibal."

That's an amusing quote by Demetri Martin, an American comedian.  But it could be the motto of NetApp.   Last week, NetApp announced that customers could use their V-series storage to dedupe primary storage of other storage manufacturers, including EMC, HDS, and yours truly, HP StorageWorks.  Customers should ask themselves, "Is this a dinner invite from a cannibal?"

Without further NetApp explanation of how this deduplication facility would be realized in other vendor storage, what configuration constraints apply or any other substantive details, NetApp made the unilateral claim.   The cynic in me wants to think that NetApp made this announcement because the advanced single instance storage (ASIS) deduplication in their storage works sub-par in their storage and they honestly wanted to offer customers the advice to try to use ASIS in someone else's storage, on the chance that it might perform better.  But seriously, the cannibal instinct of some storage vendors typically seeks to propagate their technology problems across all possible systems and eat into sound working technology.

Can I share the reason that this offer from NetApp is not a good idea? And it is not because it comes from NetApp.  This idea is not a good idea because applying deduplication in primary storage is injecting an invasive process and performance impacting process into the heart of your business operations.  The ASIS deduplication process necessarily takes valuable compute cycles from the high priority business application processing that drives many businesses.  NetApp appropriately warns customers about the performance impacting effect of ASIS. 

The following quotes are taken directly from NetApp's Deduplication Best Practices section in the text referenced below:

•  "If there is very little new data, run deduplication infrequently, because it doesn't make sense to unnecessarily consume CPU resources."
• "Use the auto mode so that deduplication only runs when significant additional data has been written to each particular flexible volume"
• "Stagger deduplication schedules for the flexible volumes so it runs on alternative days."

Source: Technical Report: NetApp Deduplication for FAS Deployment and Implementation Guide, TR-3505. Network Appliance, Inc. 16 April 2008.

And for sure, NetApp wants customers to know that there are limitations to the ASIS deduplication functionality.  In an article on the ChannelWeb website, Chris Cummings, senior director of data protection solutions for NetApp, is quoted:

"In order to activate the dedupe license, which is free, customers do need to spend about 10 minutes filling out a form that states that they know there is a chance of performance degradation when implementing the technology, depending on data type and other factors", Cummings said.

Source: http://www.crn.com/storage/209901632

Despite these vendor advisories to be careful with the use of ASIS, some customers may think, "That's OK, I can just run my dedupes at midnight."  But we have seen testing data that the performance impacting effects of ASIS can also be experienced even later when the deduped volume is used in the normal applications operations.  And for the many storage customers desperately seeking to reduce their data duplication, there is good news. 

The intelligent place to perform data reduction is in secondary and lower tier storage and during backup operations, and away from primary storage.   HP's Deduplication Strategy provides for just that, intelligent data reduction in the backup regime.  Our Deduplication Strategy, which offers "Accelerated" Deduplication for enterprise customers and "Dynamic" Deduplication for smaller businesses, is also complimented by storage space efficiency designs in the HP StorageWorks EVA that include Dynamic Capacity Management, implemented via EVA Software.

And so, it is clear that the marketplace has a keen interest in data reduction methods and technologies that hold the possibility of reducing the volume of data under management in customer storage systems.  It is also clear that some vendors have sought advantage for themselves with this marketplace phenomena and will continue to seek to capitalize on their untested hype and promises that are made with regard to their products.    And remember, never accept an invitation from a cannibal for dinner.