Data Domain
More info
- Released
- 2001–2009
- Type
- Deduplicating backup storage
- Successor
- Acquired by EMC
The company whose inline deduplication made disk cheap enough to replace backup tape — and set off a bidding war between EMC and NetApp.
Data Domain was founded in 2001, with Princeton professor Kai Li among its founders, around a single observation: backups are mostly the same data over and over. By deduplicating in real time, before anything hit disk, the company could pack weeks of backups into a fraction of the space. That made disk suddenly cheaper than magnetic tape for the job, and tape robots began coming out of server rooms.
The fight came in 2009: NetApp had agreed to buy the company when EMC stepped in with an all-cash bid of around $2.1 billion and won. The product lives on as Dell EMC Data Domain, now in SAN and backup environments the world over.