The company started operations in a series of venture capital offices around Palo Alto, California, pre-funding at U.S. Venture Partners, where Zhu was an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), then at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), where Li was an EIR, and post-funding at Greylock Partners.

Sutter Hill Ventures led its $17 million Series B funding round in 2003, joined again by NEA and Greylock.

[6] The company had their initial public offering on June 27, 2007, with a total market capitalization of $776.5 million, above its forecast range despite years of losses.

[5] In June 2009, EMC Corporation announced their intention to acquire Data Domain Corp for $2.4 billion, outbidding the previous offer.

According to a 2013 analysis sponsored by EMC, Data Domain reduced loss of user productivity from backup, restore, and retrieval operations.

[17] Originally categorized as "capacity optimization" by industry analysts, it became more widely known as inline "data deduplication.

[19] Unlike most of Data Domain's early competition, it was first packaged as a file-system appliance; this made it more predictable than a software product and simpler to manage than a virtual tape library system.

[22] By 2018, Dell EMC would produce the DD9800, which had an addressable capacity of up to 50 PB (depending on configuration), and could accept data at a rate of 8611 MB/sec.