Vendors are always using innovative developments to differentiate themselves from their competition, but also to justify purchases of their products by cost-challenged IT buyers. CA, EMC, HP, IBM and Symantec all have well-recognized, well-respected and well-accepted products in the backup/recovery software space, but that hasn't prevented competitors from successfully challenging them.
For example, CommVault has taken a rightful leadership position in this market, especially given the $66.7 million in revenues in its recent quarter, as well as continued overall revenue growth despite the economic downturn. Atempo and BakBone are expanding their efforts, and we have previously covered two younger players, Acronis and Zmanda. Acronis, with its enhanced product suite, is now able to meet enterprise-class needs in addition to those of its traditional SMB clients. Zmanda has improved its open source backup solutions with a strong cloud backup offering.
Backup/recovery software is not all that is involved in this part of the data protection space. FalconStor, Quantum, SEPATON and Spectra Logic are among the companies that participate in this space, as well. Such a crowd does little to dissuade players like Arkeia Software from seeking to make waves. Arkeia has been around since 1996 and claims 7000 enterprise customers in 70 countries, including many whose names are highly recognizable.
Arkeia deploys its network backup software in three modes: physical appliance, virtual appliance and traditional software. Its software has sophisticated enterprise-class features, such as database agents (ex. DB2 and Oracle), application agents (for Exchange) and virtual machine agents (for VMware ESX). Arkeia needed more if it hoped to achieve its ambition of being listed among tier one vendors, and they believed that data deduplication is critical to that goal. Consequently, Arkeia bought Kadena Systems for the company's data deduplication technology.
Now why would one more data deduplication product make a difference? Almost all the other vendors mentioned in this article have their own, and, for the most part, they are quite capable products. Well, there are a number of ways to distinguish data deduplication, such as where the process is performed (source or target),when it is performed (inline or post-process, although some vendors argue the benefits of policy-based solutions), and granularity (fixed block or variable block).
