In the course of a conversation today with a new SRM vendor, ArxScan, CEO Mark Fitzsimmons mentioned a use case for the startup’s product that had me raising my eyebrows: basically, keeping data deduplication systems honest.

According to Fitzsimmons, a large pharma company wanted the Arxscan product to migrate data identified as redundant by the data deduplication system to another repository and present it for review through a centralized GUI, so that the customer could sign off on what data was to be deleted.

“So you’re replacing an automated process in the data center with a manual one?” was the confused reaction from one of my editors on the conference call.

“Well, we’re working on automating it,” was the answer. “But the customer found dedupe applications weren’t working so well, and wanted a chance to look at the data before it’s deleted.”

I’ve heard of some paranoia at the high end of the market about data deduplication systems, particularly when it comes to virtual tape libraries or large companies in sensitive industries like, well, pharmaceuticals. One question I’ve heard brought up more than once by high-end users is about backing up the deduplication index on tape, the better to be able to recover data from disk drives should the deduplicating array fail. But breaking apart the process for better supervision? That’s a new one for me.

Anyone else heard of anything like this? Or is the customer going overboard?

Dell’s been so acquisitive in storage lately that every new announcement from them, especially about partnerships, has me paying attention. I don’t believe that their buying spree is necessarily over.

This week, Dell certified ExaGrid’s diskless iSCSI deduplication gateway with EqualLogic’s iSCSI SAN for secondary dedupe storage. ExaGrid claims this is the first iSCSI-based deduplication gateway. Data Domain also sells a gateway, but it’s for FC. NetApp’s deduplication works on its V-series gateways, but isn’t separable from the OnTap OS.

Still, given the concern about performance for even FC-based dedupe systems, I wonder what the appeal is of an iSCSI dedupe system based on a gateway. It seems Dell is still sussing this out, too. Senior manager for Dell/EqualLogic product marketing Kevin Wittmer said Dell will not resell or support the combined product. It instead will be sold entirely through ExaGrid channels (the two have mutual channel partners).

Wittmer said this was a project begun on the ExaGrid side before Dell acquired EqualLogic, and added “you’re going to see Dell paying attention to this market space.”

Does that mean Dell will try to make its own foray into deduplication? In other words, is this ExaGrid partnership a test to see if the technology is worth acquiring?

“We will continue to look at the market space,” Wittmer responded. ”I don’t want to go into detail right now on Dell’s product strategy.”

Then Wittmer said another thing that you could take one of several ways - “… it has much bigger implications that could impact all of Dell.”