Data Domain (corporation)

Data Domain Corporation was an Information Technology company from 2001-2009 specializing in target-based deduplication solutions for disk based backup.^[1]

In June 2009, EMC Corporation announced their intention to acquire Data Domain Corp, outbidding NetApp's previous offer.^[2] In July, the two companies reached definitive agreement regarding the acquisition. Since then, Data Domain systems have been a product line brand within the EMC Backup Recovery Systems portfolio. According to IDC, EMC in 2010 captured 64.2% share of the market for purpose-built backup devices worldwide, including mainframes. The majority of this share was from Data Domain product revenue.^[3]

CEO Frank Slootman has written the lessons of his years at the helm in his book "Tape Sucks: Inside Data Domain, a Silicon Valley Growth Story."

Data Domain was founded by Kai Li, Ben Zhu, and Brian Biles.^[4] Chief Architect Hugo Patterson was hired 3 months after initial funding. The company incubated in a series of venture capital offices; pre-funding at USVP (where Ben was an EIR), then at NEA (where Kai was an EIR), and post-funding at Greylock (NEA and Greylock provided Series A funding in 2002). The first product revenue was in the beginning of 2004.

The goal of the company was to minimize the tape automation market with a disk-based substitute. It did this by inventing a very fast implementation of lossless data compression, optimized for streaming workloads, which compares incoming large data segments against all others stored in its multi-TB store. Originally categorized as "capacity optimization" by industry analysts, it later became more widely known as inline "data deduplication" Also, unlike most non-archival computer storage products, it went to extreme technical lengths to ensure data longevity (vs. system longevity). Its design goal was to be "the storage of last resort." Unlike most of its early competition, it was first packaged as a file-system appliance; this made it more predictable than a software product and simpler to manage than a virtual tape library system.

The first Data Domain system, the DD200 in 2004, had a 1.25 TB addressable capacity and was able to accept data at a rate of 40 MB/sec. Because its implementation put most of the system stress on CPU/RAM, rather than disk I/O, it was able to improve at the rate of Intel technology. The system whose controller is equivalently provisioned in 2011, the EMC Data Domain DD890, provides 384 TB capacity and up to 14.7 TB/sec. throughput.

In its five years as a revenue-producing standalone company, Data Domain grew revenues faster than the comparable periods at Cisco and NetApp. When acquired, it had more than 800 employees worldwide. It was the most successful independent storage products company to have started in the first decade of the 21st century.

References

1. ^ "Data Domain, an EMC company." Data Domain.
2. ^ "EMC Tops NetApp’s Bid for Data Domain." 1 June 2009. New York Times Online.
3. ^ "Analyst Firm Says EMC Leads Worldwide Market for Purpose Built Backup Appliances" IDC market share press release
4. ^ "The Entrepreneur Questionnaire: Brian Biles, Co-Founder of Data Domain"

External links

• Kai Li
• Brian Biles