Tech Field Day, Part One: Nimble Storage: Page 2 of 2

With execs on the team formerly from Data Domain, NetApp and Equallogic, Nimble has taken some of the best ideas these companies had, like the ease of use and scale out architecture from Equallogic, and redirect on write snapshots from NetApp, and combined them into a very interesting product.

A bit of a kerfuffle came out when one of the Nimble Storage folks referred to their snapshot technology as data deduplication. While the net result is similar to what you'd get with deduplicating systems like Sepaton and Exagrid that use delta differentials, there won't be any duplicate data stored from multiple backups over time. I'm not comfortable calling it dedupe. First, it doesn't eliminate duplicate data where the same data exists in multiple places. Second, it doesn't actually remove duplicates, it just doesn't save them.  As the man at the carnival says "Close, but no cigar."

Note that vendors do pay the organizers to present at Tech Field Day, and that expenses including airfare, hotel, meals and copious beverages are paid out of vendor appearance fees.  I personally received the usual amount of USB thumb drives, T-shirts and the like from the vendors as well.