One of the things that continues to trouble me about how vendors use their blogs is that they often degrade into nothing more than competitive mud-slinging. Don't get me wrong, vendor blogs are perfectly good vehicles to put factual information about your product out there and to compare and contrast it to other approaches. However, it seems that the factual product content continues to decline while the rumor, innuendo, and FUD continues to rise. I cite Rich Colbert's recent blog entry over at Data Domain's Dedupe Matters as a prime example. Given ExaGrid's message to the market of having a next generation architecture for disk-based backup with data deduplication, I do not think it is a stretch to assume he was referring to ExaGrid in his tantrum.
While I plan to briefly respond to some of his points, I will quickly get back to information regarding the ExaGrid product as I think that is the source of the clear frustration Rich is feeling about the challenge by a vendor he will not name.
Rich's first premise is that if you were not first to market, you are "late" or "disorganized" and can never hope to rival the first market mover's technology or adoption. Thankfully, there are many examples of why this assertion is inaccurate. Just ask some of the other late and disorganized companies such as DELL, Microsoft, or even Sun Microsystems, none of who were the first entrants into the markets they ultimately dominated. And while not all of their current fortunes are bright, there is no question they entered markets with already coronated leaders and figured out what they missed and exploited it to great success. And there have been first entrants that have withered as times change. Anyone remember Novell?
On another point, contrary to Rich's implication that only Data Domain is established in this market, ExaGrid now has close to 400 customers in its portfolio with over 2,000 installed systems across a wide variety of verticals. We continue to have record quarter after record quarter, even in this tough climate.
And, our customers love us. In fact, more than 110 of our customers demonstrated their satisfaction by having their deduplication success with ExaGrid documented with their names and titles. This is more customer success stories than all other vendors in our space combined, including Data Domain.
While Rich's current employer can cite more customers than ExaGrid due to being the first entrant, there certainly is no question that ExaGrid's technology has been validated by the market and is responsible for our rapid growth and greater than 70% competitive win rate.
But with all of that said, IT buyers need information about products not random musings by vendors. We as vendors need to simply put our products forward so that customers can decide which one better meets their requirements. On the product front, ExaGrid brings the following unique things to this market that were not present in first generation approaches:
- Scalability - our GRID based architecture maintains a customer's backup window and restore performance as their data grows and avoids fork lift upgrades when you reach a system's capacity.
- Backup/Restore performance - our post-process architecture provides for faster backups (maximum of 5 TB/hour) and optimized restores and tape copies of most recent data by eliminating deduplication overhead.
- Contrary to assertions by exclusively in-line vendors, it is meaningless to compare restore rates for deduplicated data. If 95% of the time restores will come from the most recent backup which is in non-deduplicated form with ExaGrid , then what is the point?
- Suggesting that it is important to compare restores from deduplicated data is like saying an airline with a 5% on-time arrival record is equal to one with a 95% on-time record because the better airline is also late 5% of the time.
- Unified management - ExaGrid's management interface places an entire multi-site installation in a single web interface for all configuration and management reducing management time and complexity.
- Backup job aware reporting - ExaGrid uniquely can provide deduplication ratios and replication status by backup job so that users can really maximize their space savings and understand exactly which backup jobs are ready for restore at a DR location.
I wonder if it is the above differences that made Rich afraid to "help our organic search results" by mentioning us by name? If a company is as invincible as he made Data Domain sound, why be afraid your prospective customers will find a later to market company making wild claims such as a markedly better approach?