Dell EMC Data Domain a Decade of Leadership  

The Data Domain company was founded in 2001. The Data Domain appliance was created to transition tape-based backup to disk. Disk-based backup allowed for greater compression rates and the ability to reduce storage consumption by comparing new backup data to already stored data, thus making backups much more efficient. The process of comparing new data to stored data was originally called, “capacity optimization” and has since been changed across the industry to data deduplication, or dedupe for short.

Data Domain began collecting Series A and Series B funding in 2002 and eventually went public in June of 2007, raising over $110 million from 7.4 million shares. In June 2009, EMC Corporation announced their intention to acquire Data Domain. Once Data Domain was brought into the portfolio, the adoption of Data Domain appliances accelerated.

In 2004, the DD200 appliance had a capacity threshold of 1.25TB. Today’s Dell EMC Data Domain product line has a top end DD9800 appliance capacity threshold of 1PB, or roughly 1000 times the capacity of the DD200. The current line of appliances also includes Data Domain Virtual Edition, which gives you the ability to take advantage of a Data Domain appliance in a virtual form factor, both on-premises and in the cloud. Data Domain appliances also support cloud tiering for long-term retention, expanding available capacity by up to 2x. Cloud tier allows the customer to tier data to a supported cloud of their choice, freeing up space on their on-premises appliances.

Rich Colbert, Field CTO at Dell EMC, sat down with Jeff Frick and Dave Vellante from The SiliconANGLE to discuss the acquisition and the innovation packed into Data Domain over the past decade.

According to the IDC Market Spotlight, Purpose-Built Backup Appliances: 2018 Market Results, Dell EMC enjoyed a 60% market share of the $3.6 billion PBBA market in 2018. Dell EMC has been the market leader by revenue for as long as IDC has been tracking the market.

Data Domain has had a successful decade as part of the now Dell EMC portfolio, and we look forward to what is coming next! Make sure to check out our data protection blogs and follow us on Twitter for more data protection news. Enough from us, check out what our customers have to say about Data Domain appliances.

FieldCore, a GE Company

The Dell EMC solution was implemented in less than four days. “We went from a 4:1 deduplication ratio to a 41:1 deduplication ratio with Data Domain. We saw backups go from taking upwards of 24 hours to complete to 98% of our backups completing in less than one hour. This allowed us to replicate our data before the storm actually hit.” – Kerry Johnson – Senior Systems Engineer – FieldCore

Phoenix Children’s Hospital

Before Phoenix Children’s Hospital had implemented protection storage from Dell EMC, their prior solution resulted in backup windows that were upwards of 24 hours. “Moving to Data Domain with deduplication we can finish our full backups in less than 7 hours” – Theodore Fotias – VP IT Infrastructure – Phoenix Children’s Hospital

About the Author: Sharad Rastogi

Sharad Rastogi is the SVP, Product Management, Data Protection at Dell EMC.