NetApp Raises Bid for Data Domain

NetApp (NTAP) has countered EMC’s takeover bid for Data Domain with a revised offer of $30 a share in cash and stock.  The new offer matches EMC’s price per share, but includes stock while EMC’s bid is all cash. Meanwhile, Data Domain’s share price continued to rise in anticipation of a higher bid from EMC. 

NetApp announced May 20 that it was buying Data Domain (DDUP) for $25 a share, or $1.5 billion. On Monday EMC jumped into the fray with a surprise bid of $30 a share. NetApp is asserting that its revised offer is superior to the EMC bid. 

“Our strategic rationale remains the same and we firmly believe that the combination of our two companies will provide a greater opportunity and risk-adjusted value for Data Domain shareholders, customers, and partners,” said Dan Warmenhoven, chairman and CEO of NetApp. “The complementary nature of the Data Domain and NetApp product lines will result in higher aggregate growth compared to the redundancies that would result with the EMC product line.”

The Battle for Data Domain

It’s the Day After for the storage industry as it digests EMC’s bombshell $1.8 billion bid for Data Domain (DDUP), topping a $1.5 billion offer from NetApp. There was plenty of discussion and analysis from around the Net. Here’s a roundup of some of the notable commentary:

• Steve Duplessie at Enterprise Strategy Group is perplexed. “I see absolutely nothing logical in the move, and if I were NetApp, I would look at this as the world’s best Mulligan. EMC has 19 dedupe solutions already, owns Quantum practically, and ALREADY sells more target based backup systems than DD.  Why on earth would they want to pay that much for another version of a feature?” (He has a follow-up post with much more)
• EMC’s Chuck Hollis tries to answer Steve’s question, writing that EMC is seeking to build a portolio of deduplication offerings. “There’s no single ‘best approach’ simply because there are so many places where dedupe can be intelligently used … Hence EMC’s interest in Data Domain as well as many other forms of compression, single instancing and data deduplication.”
• Brian Gracely of NetApp doesn’t comment directly, but points readers to an earlier post by Hollis which called NetApp-Data Domain a “questionable deal.” He writes: “A long time ago, my mother taught me that if I didn’t have anything nice to say, not to say anything at all … Be sure that you have friends and partners that you trust both in good times and in difficult times.  Their words today will reveal a lot about your relationships in the coming months and years.” 
• Stephen Foskett says the offer seems logical. ”Although many questions were raised about the fit for Data Domain within NetApp’s product lineup, the fit in EMC makes more sense. Their Quantum-based VTLs are expensive and enterprise-focused, while a new Data Domain-powered line might have broader appeal.”
• Marc Farley at StorageRap says DDUP was almost certainly shopped to EMC before the NetApp deal was announced, and sees “loser’s remorse” driving EMC’s bid. “My guess is that EMC looked at their own dedupe products and realized that they could see their own products getting killed by the Netapp/DDUP combination.  Apparently EMC views dedupe as strategic and they saw a failure in their strategy passing before their eyes. They really should have taken care of business earlier rather than playing chicken with Netapp and DDUP.”

FalconStor VTL Claims Fastest DR Time

How long is your backup window? for many data center managers, the answer is “longer than I’d like.” Reducing the time required to back up and restore data in a disaster recovery scenario is a a key focus for FalconStor Software (FALC), which has optimized its Virtual Tape Library (VTL) to address this challenge.

On Monday FalconStor released results of performance tests that its VTL now delivers the fastest “total time to disaster recovery (DR)” in the industry, the company said. By running the backup and deduplication processes concurrently, FalconStor was able to back up, copy and restore 100 terabytes of data in 26 hours, with an average transfer of 2 gigabits of data per second during the backup and dedupe process.

“Total time to DR is critical to the resilience of any business that relies on 24-hour access to important applications,” said Lauren Whitehouse, analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group. “A high-performance backup infrastructure is critical to reducing a business’s exposure to downtime by ensuring data recovery and full return to operability in a timely manner. FalconStor has clearly taken the entire process from backup to recovery into consideration to achieve optimal efficiency in terms of both time and cost.”

EMC Tops NetApp Bid for Data Domain

A bidding war has erupted in the storage sector, as EMC Corporation (EMC) today offered to acquire deduplication specialist Data Domain (DDUP) for $30 a share in cash, topping last week’s $25 a share takeover offer from NetApp (NTAP). EMC’s all-cash offer values the deal at $1.8 billion, a 20 percent premium to the cash and stock offer made by NetApp.

“EMC’s all-cash proposal is superior to the proposed NetApp transaction providing Data Domain stockholders greater value and certainty,” the company said in a statement. “EMC’s proposal is not subject to a financing or due diligence contingency, and the company will use existing cash balances to finance the transaction. EMC is promptly commencing a tender offer for all outstanding Data Domain common stock in order to expedite the timing of this transaction.”

NetApp Buys Data Domain for $1.5B

In a major deal for the storage sector, NetApp (NTAP) announced after the bell that it will buy Data Domain (DDUP) for $25 a share in cash and stock, or about $1.5 billion. Shares of Data Domain closed today at $17.93, so the deal price represents a hefty premium for investors.

The deal highlights the growing importance of deduplication, which saves space on storage devices by eliminating duplicate copies of the same file or data. Data Domain has emerged as a leading player in deduplication and the shift from tape storage to disk-based backup. Data Domain systems identify redundant files and data as they are being stored, creating a storage footprint that can be 10 to 30 times smaller than the original dataset. NetApp offers deduplication in its virtual tape library (VTL), disk-based systems.    

‘Digital Universe’ Now 487 Billion Gigabytes

The PetaBox infrastructure used by the Internet Archive, circa 2007.

How much digital stuff are we creating? According to IDC, the global volume of digital content has reached 487 billion gigabytes - that’s 487 exabytes, for those who can get their heads around that large a number. It’s a lot of stuff.

• Expressed numerically, it’s 487,000,000,000 gigabytes
• If converted to paper, it could wrap the entire earth eight times over.
• If that paper were stacked, the pile would stretch to Pluto and back 10 times   

A closer look at the Digital Universe report reveals that up to 95 percent of that digital deluge is unstructured data described as “packets, RFID, sensors and messages,” with the remainder being computer files and images.

eBay’s Enormous Data Warehouses

Curt Monash of Monash Research, who tracks the database industry, recently visited eBay to learn more about the enormous data warehouses supporting the user information for the company’s online auction operations. In a blog post today, Curt shares some iof what he learned about these systems, which he says are “two of the very largest data warehouses in the world”: 

• A Greenplum data warehouse holding 6.5 petabytes of user data, or more than 17 trillion records. More than 150 billion new records are added each day.
• A Teradata data warehouse with 2 petabytes of user data, being fed by hundreds of production databases.

Lots of big numbers, to say the least. See Monash Research for the full story.

Carbonite Lawsuit Reveals Data Loss

Here’s a tough question: how do you balance the value of a problematic lawsuit against a vendor against the potential damage to your company’s reputation? Executives from Carbonite Inc. may be pondering that calculus this morning amid disclosures that the fast-growing online backup company lost data belonging to 7,500 customers.

The data loss was disclosed in a lawsuit Carbonite filed against two companies that supplied it with hardware. The legal dispute was covered by The Boston Globe Saturday and picked up this morning by TechCrunch and The Register, where it will no doubt be read by many of Carbonite’s customers and prospects.