Riverbed (RVBD), which made its mark in wide-area network optimization, earlier this week unveiled a move into an entirely new area designed to improve the efficiency of enterprise storage. If the new product catches on, the implications are ominous for enterprise storage providers like NetApp (NTAP) and EMC (EMC).
Riverbed calls its new product Atlas, and says it can eliminate up to 95% of redundant data in corporate storage systems. In a release earlier this week, the company asserted that the Atlas appliance “will do for its customers’ data at rest” what the company’s Steelhead products “have done for their data in motion,” eliminating redundancy “which typically burdens IT infrastructure by slowing down access to data and applications and increasing costs and operational overhead of data management.”
In an interview with Tech Trader Daily, Riverbed’s Eric Wolford, SVP for marketing and business development, asserted that Atlas can take the 70%-90% of data in the world that is redundant, and replace it with pointers to single instances of the data. He says that the product has the potential to make data storage 3x-10x more efficient.
Wolford says the concept is similar to the de-duplication technology used by Data Domain (DDUP) and others in back-up storage; Riverbed is focusing on primary storage. He says the approach DDUP takes is to rip-and-replace - they don’t make storage better, they replace your storage provider. He says Riverbed’s concept is to improve your current storage systems.
Wofford thinks the potential market for the product is huge: anyone who has 10 terabytes or more of data stored.
To me, this sounds like Riverbed is creating a threat to the storage sector that is not unlike the dangers VMware (VMW) and server virtualization created for server hardware companies. Wolford played down that aspect of the story, asserting that test users have responded by taking some data that had been available only in secondary storage and making it accessible to users directly. He also says that in the long-run, the storage vendors want to make money selling storage software, not just disk space. However, Wolford makes the eye-opening claim that alpha testers are finding they can increase primary storage by 300%-1,000% by using Atlas. That sure makes Atlas sound like a big threat to the storage vendors, don’t you think?
Riverbed said it plans to start shipping the product in the 2009 first half.
Not sure if the Riverbed news this week is responsible, but it is the case that storage stocks Thursday are under pressure: NetApp closed down $1.37, or 6.3%, to $20.43; EMC closed down 43 cents, or 3.4%, to $12.41; RVBD closed up 34 cents, or 2.6%, to $13.29.
