Cost-Efficient Storage Solutions and Deduplication will Become Inextricably Linked; Interview with Permabit CEO Tom Cook

Many deduplication technologies attack the storage optimization angle at the tail end of the data management process: when it is transmitted by the backup software to a target storage device. However, some storage providers believe that as the benefits of deduplication are better understood by organizations, deduplication technology will rapidly move upstream such that it will become a core feature in more primary, value-tier and cloud storage offerings. In this second part of a two-part interview with Permabit’s CEO Tom Cook, I discuss with Tom the increased focus that enterprises are putting on deploying cost-efficient storage solutions and how  is evolving to help these organizations deliver on that objective.
Jerome: Permabit attacks the common business problem of data growth before it becomes a backup problem. What trends are you starting to see in the enterprise as they become more serious about addressing data growth before it becomes a backup problem?
Tom: I think that is really interesting. This came up the other day when I was talking to a storage professional. The only reason to have optimization in your D2D environment is if you have a 24 hour clock problem. As soon as it is 23 hours and 59 minutes, it is not a problem.
If you really think about where deduplication technology can be applied and how it can become more valuable to an enterprise, start with primary storage and focus on moving static / persistent information off of it to a value tier so you are not backing it up repeatedly. When you do those things, you can reduce your cost structure by, in many cases, 10-20x of what it was before. You decrease the importance for optimization at the D2D backup level and improve your overall organizational efficiency tremendously.
Again, we advocate that data deduplication technology belongs in all storage systems across the board – the sooner that organizations start the process of ubiquitous deduplication, the more money they save. If we look at a pie chart, we view the D2D market as being a very thin sliver of that pie – it’s like the diet slice of the pie.  7/8’s of the pie chart is the rest of the storage environment and if organizations deduplicate that larger part of their environment, they will get a lot more bang for their buck.
Jerome: So when you look at deduplication and Permabit’s overall architecture, it would appear Permabit’s technology is well positioned to take advantage of cloud storage. What is Permabit doing in this area to capitalize on this forthcoming trend? 
Tom:  It is great you are asking this question because we just recently soft-launched “” which is up on our website under “Products.” Why did we do this? We did this because we see a growing trend and requirement from public cloud providers as well as private cloud implementers in organizations. It is available in either 72 TB or 144 TB footprints and scales to 4.6 PBs. It has exceptionally fast ingest and access rates. It has massive scalability as we have throughout all of our product lines. It has 24 X 7 access capability with tremendous security. It is extremely cost-efficient.  A perfect offering for the cloud -public or private!
We are really hitting the key attributes that are necessary in this market place and supplying it. In our OEM efforts, we have been out talking to a lot of people. We had the CTO of a major organization communicate to us that if he had seen our cloud capability, they would have never begun development of their own!  We have tremendous capability in this area and we are starting to push it out into the market place.
We currently supply multiple service providers as well as enterprise implementations of private clouds. What we are seeing is a trend in the industry that the service providers seem to be addressing more middle market and upper middle market companies. We have seen internal cloud efforts with major enterprises that can approximate the costs of a major service provider and do it on an internal basis and achieve real efficiency with this.
Of course, our product has had multi-tenancy capabilities from the beginning so we have slid right into this new market opportunity. We have truly been in the cloud business for several years and we are now telling people about our new tailored cloud storage offering so we can address this need very directly.
Jerome: You mentioned you are selling to service providers as well as helping to enable private clouds. Are you seeing any customers planning to use both public storage clouds and private storage clouds so they have a mix in their environment? Are you in a position to support both of those types of environments and can you explain how you plan to do that?
Tom: I do not have customers today that are doing both as our customers have chosen to go one way or the other.  You will see us broaden this offering over the next few months with some partner offerings; meaning data movement type partners that we will be working with and some of them might have the capability to split stream which could be quite interesting.
But what it really comes down to is cost. Customers are going to move their information to where they can achieve the best cost efficiencies. If it is a very large organization and if they believe they can build out their own cloud and then sell those services internally to their company, they are going to do so. We have seen companies do that on a very efficient basis.
We are really good with that because we provide great reporting. We enable our customers to meter storage usage and do charge back. The flip side of that is if they are not that large and do not feel they can reach those economies of scale, I think there will be plenty of service offerings available for them to choose from in the market place.
We think companies will end up in two categories: Outstanding service providers and technology providers to service providers. We are not big believers in the model of doing both where a company tries to be both a technology company and a service provider. We think that is a really, really ambitious task, particularly for an earlier stage company.
We really would like to be an “arms merchant” if you will, to supply outstanding service providers with the most scalable, most cost-efficient technology in the market place. That is what we are driving at right now.
Jerome: So if I understand you correctly, you have no plans for Permabit to become a cloud storage provider? You are going to provide technology to enable those whose business plan is to be a cloud storage provider. 
Tom: Absolutely. Some smart companies have tried to do both which makes it tough from a capital standpoint. We are a technology provider and we want to help those people who want to be service providers. For us, it is another distribution vehicle. It is a way for us to meet middle market needs with a product that is massively scalable in a very cost-efficient manner.
In the first  of this two-part interview, I discussed with Tom what impact Data Domain’s acquisition will have on Permabit and how it has led to the emergence of “Dedupe 2.0”.