Hey Marc,

Thanks for posting about this.  How long has this partnership been in place?  I asked our sales rep about de-dupe multiple times and they've mostly just looked at me like I was an alien or something.  I was eventually given an answer than Equallogic had no plans regarding dedupe, and there was no mention of a partner.  In seems like this news might need to be pushed harder in the channel.  If Equallogic can't communitcate this news to their customers it's not that suprising that Alex might think that Equallogic has no strategy there.

Later,

Tom

Yes Tom,  we don't always do a great job highlighting what we have.  So, I was truly was grateful to Alex for reminding me about our de-dupe with Exagrid solution. 

Mark

I'm surprised you saw my post as snarky (which I read as sarcastic or nasty). It wasn't intended that way, and to be frank, I suspect that many think the same way as I do; I think Dell paid an awful lot of dosh. What for?

Referring to a post from some time ago was meant to point out that there's still no dedupe on the EqualLogic array. What used to be your big selling point (correct me if I'm wrong here) was the all-in-one price that EqualLogic touted as reducing customer costs. Dell/ExaGrid deduplication isn't free, and it's limited to dedupe for backup only.

NetApp's deduplication works on all our storage, on any protocol, on any tier of storage, and is free. That's a big difference.

And please, could you spell it NetApp? Speed typing beyond your limits? Slow down, otherwise I'll be typing Dell/Aqualogic from here on in ;-)

Alex, Yes, there is no native dedupe in EqualLogic arrays and yes, one of our selling points is zero cost software for everything we have, such as Exchange and SQL Server snapshots, thin provisioning, volume cloning, storage tiering, load balancing, remote replication and broad platform support, including virtual servers.

As you point out, Exagrid's dedupe is not free, but customers think its worth spending their money on.

As for NAS - you never know, but we've asked a lot of our customers and they tell us they don't need it and don't want it.  They tell us file servers are just as easy to install and manage - especially in virtual environs. They also tell us they don't want to be locked into their NAS vendor's hardware options and being the last in line for new processor upgrades. So, if we ever do release NAS, it will be an option and not mandatory. 

Did I spell Netapp wrong somewhere?  Didn't mean to.