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Open letter to EMC: Change your Data Domain licensing model and stop taxing your customers

TrevorD
Level 2
Employee Accredited

Deduplication makes disk-based data protection an economically viable and important part of an overall data protection strategy. Unfortunately, EMC customers quickly learn that there is a significant tax burden to bear  for deploying Data Domain deduplication. As a result, EMC is found wanting when it comes to saving organizations money by using deduplication. EMC should change its licensing model.

EMC should repeal the replication tax. Today, if organizations want to replicate a backup set offsite to another appliance as part of their disaster recovery strategy, they must pay for replication licenses to store that secondary copy. Customers replicating with Data Domain would also need to buy 2X other software license options such as Boost. EMC should stop charging their customers every time they want to make a copy of the deduped data.

EMC should stop charging twice for client-side dedupe. Many organizations want the flexibility to use both source-side and target-side deduplication.  For EMC customers to have that flexibility, they must use a solution combining Avamar and Data Domain. To use source-side deduplication, they must pay twice: once to dedupe on the source-side with Avamar and again to store that data on a Data Domain target-side device.

Finally, EMC should not treat software like hardware. Data Domain software is tied to their hardware. If a customer needs to refresh their Data Domain hardware, they must pay for deduplication software all over again.  

In summary, EMC should change its licensing model to allow its customers to fully exploit all the benefits that dedupe can offer.

A more customer friendly approach would be to follow the licensing model for Symantec NetBackup Appliances. Organizations pay only once for deduplication using a front end capacity based pricing model and can then replicate deduplicated data as often as they want without further charges. Customers also have the flexibility to perform both source or target dedupe with a single license. Software and hardware are licensed separately.

Thank you,

The Symantec NetBackup Team

For more information on NetBackup and NetBackup Appliances please visit www.netbackup.comor www.netbackupappliance.com.