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  • NetApp Awaits EMC Response to Data Domain Bid


    The bidding war for Data Domain stepped up this week after NetApp raised the stakes with rival EMC by making a new cash and stock offer of USD $1.9 billion.

    It came two days after EMC’s offer of USD $30 per share in a deal worth about USD $1.8 billion – around 20 per cent over the original USD $1.5 billion offered LINK last month by NetApp.

    Data Domain, a market leader in data deduplication technology, manufactures a series of storage appliances that tightly integrates its dedupe technology with dedicated storage capacity.

    It also offers software for data replication and virtual tape libraries.

    Both EMC and NetApp currently offer data dedupe technology.

    The increased offer from NetApp means that, if accepted, its offer would use up almost all it’s US cash balance of USD $1.26 billion.

    However, EMC is widely expected to counter with an all-cash offer.

  • NetApp Buys Data Domain For $1.5bn


    NetApp announced this week that it has agreed to buy data backup and disaster recovery systems provider Data Domain Inc. for USD $25 per share in cash and stock, or about USD $1.5 billion.

    The data storage company said it will operate Data Domain as a product line.

    The result should accelerated growth and market adoption, according to NetApp, since Data Domain has the distribution channels and global reach to offer its products to more customers.

    Data Domain’s board has unanimously approved the deal, which is expected to close in the next two to four months.

    On Wednesday, NetApp reported a drop in fiscal fourth-quarter profit as revenue declined amid the economic turmoil.

  • Storage Market Slows, Modest Growth Forecast


    Well, it was only a matter of time. The data storage market has slowed down – and much more than anticipated, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    IDC revealed last week that global external disk storage systems’ factory revenues dropped by a half per cent in the fourth quarter.
    This is the first quarterly drop for data storage in more than 5 years.

    According to IDC, EMC, HP, Dell and Hitachi did grow a little in the last quarter, as expected.

    However, IBM, NetApp and Sun Microsystems all posted year-over-year sales declines.

    In the 4th quarter, external system revenues dropped slightly to USD $5.3 billion, while the total disk storage system market dropped 5.9 per cent to USD $7.3 billion chiefly due to limitations in server system sales.

    The other big decline was seen in the total disc storage system capacity, which peaked at 2,460 petabytes, a growth of only 27.3 per cent, but this was down by 50 per cent compared to the growth rate in the past.

    Natalya Yezkhova, IDC research manager for storage systems, said: "Because of the global economic crisis, the last quarter of 2008 was tough for the disk storage systems market, resulting in a market decline from the same quarter last year."

    She said that high-end storage sales were upset by a chill in the end-user expenditures and longer acquisition cycles.

    But some low-end and midrange storage sectors have continued to sale well, "as end users broadened their search for storage solutions in these lower-cost segments to satisfy their increasing storage needs while optimizing investments in storage infrastructure."

    EMC continues to hold the leadership with its external systems market share lead of nearly 23.3 per cent of revenue in the fourth quarter, followed by IBM and HP, with 15.7 per cent and 13 per cent respectively.

    Dell did not fare well and ended the quarter in the fourth position with a 9.3 per cent share.

    Hitachi and NetApp followed with 7 per cent growth, while Sun had 5.2 per cent.

    In the Open SAN market, which only grew 2.2 per cent, EMC was again in the lead with 24.2 per cent of the market.

    IBM followed next with 16.5 per cent.

    The NAS market has grown steadily and recorded a 8.6 per cent rise.

    Again, EMC led the pack with 43.8 per cent, followed by NetApp at 24.1 per cent.

    The sum network disk storage market (NAS combined with Open SAN) grew a modest 3.6 pe cent to USD $4.1 billion in revenues.

    EMC again claimed a 28.6 per cent revenue share, followed by IBM at 14.5 per cent.

    So what are the expectations for the rest of 2009?

    Enterprise Strategy Group and IDC both speculate a modest growth of 2-3 per cent for both the data storage industry overall IT spending.

    In an industry, which has always seen green, adjustment to single digit profits may not sit well for many people.

  • Sun Microsystems and The World's First Open Storage Appliance


    Just a few months ago, Sun Microsystems revealed the availability of its new Unified Storage System – the Sun Storage 7000 family.

    Described as the world’s first Open Storage Appliance, Sun claims the Storage 7000 family is the "biggest thing to happen to storage in decades", writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz-news.

    Quite a brag – though the product’s creativity and innovation speaks volumes for Sun’s group of engineers.

    The Storage 7000 family has three different versions – the 7110, 7210, and 7410 – which have an overall capacity ranging from 2 Tbytes to 288 Tbytes.

    However, the 7410 offers a collected configuration (for advanced accessibility) and is typically aimed for enterprise class configurations, whereas the 7110 and 7210 are better designed for less significant fittings.

    The Sun Storage Unified system can run both NAS and SAN solutions, and Sun pulls seriously on its well-respected ZFS (Zettabyte File System) in the Storage 7000 family.

    Unified storage space rivals EMC Corp, NetApp Inc and IBM Corp have so far focused their attention on IT environments that have a strong NAS presence – but they would very much like to manage SAN as well.

    Sun, meanwhile, has put a major emphasis on facilitating the Storage 7000 family to provide universal function storage requirements.
    The major thrust of Sun’s message for the Storage 7000 is that it makes life a lot easier for storage administrators.

    Sun caims the installations process only takes a few minutes, but persists with key courses of action such as thin provisioning, a function which is embedded in ZFS (as logical storage pools can be enlarged or diminished transparently as long as there is sufficient physical storage to carry them).

    Another feature of the Storage 7000 technology that is of benefit to administration is the concept of DTrace, a collection of analysis that permits real-time system diagnostics.

    Engineers at Sun feel that DTrace can significantly advance storage system troubleshooting to a level never seen before in the industry.

    Another aspect of the Sun Storage 7000 is its performance.

    The company appropriately calls it Hybrid Storage Pools, which shares DRAM, read, and write optimized flash devices that work in working in combination with hard disc drives.

    Sun maintains that the innovative use of SSD technology can help flash memory combine with disc technology resulting in a mega performance that is very cost effective.

    While all that is great, Sun Microsystems continues to show a financial downturn having lost more than USD $1.7 billion in the first quarter of 2009 that ended in Sept 2008.

    With the ongoing financial crises and global recession, the question remains – how well does the Storage 7000 system fit in with other Sun storage products and how does the company plan to market and sell them in a cost efficient method?

    Only time will tell.