Disclaimer: everything that follows is my opinion. In no way should it be mistaken for any sort of official EMC position. Any resemblance to that is purely coincidental.
Amidst the chaos and confusion of the EMC offer to buy Data Domain, I think the biggest unanswered question has been: why would EMC want to have three or four or five different deduplication technologies?
Truthfully, I think the question has a profoundly simple answer: because backup sucks.
Mmmm, irony.
Don't believe me? Show of hands: how many people actually like their existing backup application?
Given the name of this blog, and that I have spent the last 15 years plus on backup and recovery, I think I can appreciate the irony as well as any.
Even more ironic when we remember that Data Domain's original slogan was: tape sucks.
And by the way, there is a back handed answer in there as to why it makes sense for Data Domain to be acquired by somebody. If you claim that tape sucks, and you try to "fix" this with another piece of hardware, all you are really doing is building a better tape drive. You are trying to be StorageTek, only better. Where better means faster and cheaper. But does a faster and cheaper tape drive make backup suck less? Maybe. But probably not nearly as much as it could--if you had a broader perspective and reach with your technology roadmap, one that includes CDP, primary storage, a backup application, and some virtualization capability. More on what I would do with all that later. But one final question: if your objective is to fix backup, completely, and you think that you need access to all those components to do that, who is going to be in a better position to do this? EMC? Or NetApp?
Having said that, the biggest obstacle to fixing backup is not technology. It is inertia. It is cultural. It is fear of change. It is ingrained process. It is the fact that we have done things one way for so long that the reason we are going things has been forgotten.