Today NetApp bought the SnapProtect trademark from CommVault (Screwing the premiere showcase partner on the CommVault website, Dell Equallogic, in the process) and agreed to resell Simpana.
From a technology standpoint the only thing they’re adding to that Banana is a bruise since CommVault already did everything they’re banging the drum about yesterday and the value of a backup application is in it’s application awareness to which NetApp contributes nothing.
Bottom line, CommVault has grown beyond NetApp’s reach so having missed the opportunity once again to get into the backup market their only option is to resell.
There’s a long history here of licensing technology from BakBone, SyncSort and now CommVault, painting a blue stripe across it and palming it off as their own.
At this stage they’re running out of backup application vendors to sign a distribution agreement with.
One might ask where’s Symantec in all of this? I’d say still trying to sell themselves to Huawei. Having been burned by NetApp on the original OpenStorage development project I think they’re not returning too many NetApp phone calls these days anyway.
Point In Time Copies on the array. This is supposed to be the new new thing, right?
Indeed you can already take application consistent array based point in time copies on EMC Arrays, restore from them and roll them over to external media.
It’s so much of a new new thing that functionality shipped in the NetWorker PowerSnap module.
In 2003.
The first release even supporting backup of remote devices in an SRDF group on a different Symmetrix.
Today PowerSnap supports application & catalogue consistent point in time backup using TimeFinder, SnapView, SnapSure and RecoverPoint CDP.
You can even backup NetApp systems with NetApp Snapshots with the EMC NetWorker PowerSnap for NAS Module.
The question becomes though with the ubiquity of software snapshot solutions in server virtualisation products, such as VSS and what VADP can give you, why bother locking yourself into an array based technology at all?
While there will always be corner cases with physical workloads, virtual workloads are moveable workloads and can end up anywhere, on any storage at any time.
