A tweet from the guys at EMC caught our eye:
This link lead to an nice blog entry about how EMC and Teradata are improving their partnership etc etc. but we noticed that the blog neglects to address some of the fundamental architecture concerns end users need to understand when considering big data backup.
Customer are voting with their wallets, and Data Domain is rapidly losing credibility as a strategic investment. Read Peter's Valentine's Day love note blog for a detailed outline of the market space, and read mine on how we think about winning and losing in this space. Data Domain is a fine product and many, many customers use it as a NetBackup target. But when you are EMC, and your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
The scenario touted in the blog our friends at EMC wrote simply neglects to mention that the entire partnership depends on someone else doing the data moving. It doesn't work without a brain guiding the brawn. In fact, EMC in the same blog entry refers readers to a Teradata article that highlights how effective Symantec NetBackup is as a media server. The Teradata folks are long time partners of ours and do indeed depend on Symantec NetBackup as the brains of their big data protection schema.
You'll notice next, if you browse around the BAR web pages in the Teradata site, that EMC has no software qualified to do this smart work - despite a wide portfolio of disparate solutions for moving data around.
Here's the bottom line. Symantec's Integrated Backup vision gives customers the freedom and simplicity to make choices on their own schedules for their reasons. EMC's years of brute force hardware revenue forces them into applying their own agenda to customers, leaving out critical parts of the complete protection story. We think that is shortsighted, and the market seems to be supporting a more intelligent approach.
