Hi,

I work for an EMC partner selling into the mid-market.

In this space the Celerra/CLARiiON is very compelling from a feature/price point of view, but it is a lot more difficult to sell the EMC backup solutions.

Clearly one reason for this is that backup products are much more 'sticky' than storage products.

I also believe that unlike Celerra/CLARiiON which are priced for mass consumption, Avamar and Data Domain are priced for the high-end of the market.

It is also confusing from a customer point of view that there are two backup solutions (i.e. NetWorker and Avamar) and two dedupe solutions (Avamar and Data Domain), which also results in massive duplication (ironically!!!) of resources within EMC.

Avamar is good as a pure dedupe solution but it lacks some of capabilities that NetWorker has (i.e. tape management) and NetWorker lacks some of the capabilities of Avamar (i.e. VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection support).

Avamar also has problems in the fact that a single appliance of 3.3TB is just too small, clearly Data Domain can scale way beyond this.

What EMC need to do is dedupe their backup solutions!!!

I attended EMC World this year and I came away thinking that by 2011 EMC would have a backup solution much more like:

1. Backup software: NetWorker with agents that can either perform a conventional or source-based dedupe backup with a start-of-the-art easy to use Unisphere based interface

2. Backup target: Data Domain which would support NetWorker conventional and source based dedupe backups and 3rd party backup solutions

In additon it would be nice to see:

1. Data Domain available as a VM (i.e. like Avamar)

2. A low-cost tier of dedupe storage designed for long-term retention (i.e. to finally replace tape)

3. An Avamar client built into Celerra for dedupe of NDMP backups at source

I think the market is going through massive change (i.e. a move to virtualisation and replicated storage arrays even at the low end).

At the same time customers would like to replace their aging tape-based backup with a dedupe solution.

If EMC can deliver a unified solution that takes all the best bits of their technologies, makes it easy to use and prices it for mass consumption there is no reason why most Celerra/CLARiiON sales cannot include a new backup solution.

Customers want it, so roll-on 2011.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Many thanks

Mark