Report: EMC walks away with dedupe appliance market
Pathetic rivals handed it the world on a, erm, platter
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When it comes to the disk-based backup appliance market, there is EMC and IBM and then there is everyone else.
Market analyst IDC has just released a report, "Worldwide Purpose-Built Backup Appliance 2012–2016 Forecast and 2011 Vendor Shares", that shows EMC utterly dominating the disk-based backup appliance market with its Data Domain and Avamar technology, not forgetting its mainframe Disk Library product. EMC now has 65.5 per cent share of the $2.4bn revenues IDC attributed to this market in 2011, earning $1.58bn.
Every vendor you would expect is included in IDC's supplier list, except NetApp, which tried to buy Data Domain in 2009 only to see EMC snatch it out of its fingers. Shortly afterwards, bruised and defeated, NetApp retired from a disk-based backup product market that it could be dominating today.
Second to EMC is IBM, with a respectable 15.3 per cent share, $370.1m. HP is third, just getting over the three-figure mark with $100.6m, a niggardly 4.1 per cent. Symantec is fourth with 3.5 percent, Quantum fifth with its DXi product line gaining it 2.6 per cent and $63.8m – relative peanuts. After that things get ridiculous.
Oracle comes sixth with 1.9 per cent and $45.5m. Fujitsu is seventh at 1.5 per cent and $36m. Sepaton is number eight with $35m and 1.4 percent; Exagrid is languishing at ninth with $314m and 1.3 percent; and struggling FalconStor is tenth – with 1.1 per cent and $27.7m. Last of all is Dell, with 1 per cent and $24.5m. The "others" category gets a near-invisible 0.7 per cent.
This is pathetic. Data Domain is using mostly the same hardware as everybody else, getting the latest processors to the market quickly we have to say, but its dominance is a wake-up call to the others. Come on guys; you're letting EMC walk all over you. This isn't a competition, it's a race in which EMC is driving a racing car, IBM a wheezy old sedan, and everyone else is on foot.
What NetApp's complete and utter failure to partake in this market indicates is that its A-SIS deduplication technology simply doesn't cut the dedupe backup mustard. If it did NetApp could stuff it into a cut-down FAS300 array with stripped out ONTAP data management software and sell it as a virtual tape library (VTL), resurrecting the old NearStore product line it retired a couple of years ago.
EMC's BRS division head, Bill "BJ" Jenkins must think he's dreaming. His competitors, with the exception of IBM and HP, are nowhere to be seen. IBM looks steady and happy with its 15.3 per cent while HP is getting ambitious and aggressive with its StoreOnce technology and B6200. Dell is pushing its Ocarina-based products but has a very, very long way to go. Everyone else looks effectively stuck in a rut. All this means EMC's reps and channel partners are in the cushy position of actually needing something to sell against. ®
COMMENTS
PBBAs are doing backup wrong
Agree with seanjregan. PBBAs are ok to replace or augment tape, but they do not fundamentally change the broken backup process. You need to address the problem from end-to-end, not just at the target. And you really aren't helping recovery much if you stick with the file-based, streaming-data paradigm. There are better ways to do things.
I actually blogged about just this a few weeks ago: http://bit.ly/La7K8Y
Peter Eicher
Syncsort
Re: Backup is dead!
I really hope that's not what you do.
Where's your plan 'B'? Snapshots are dependent on the primary data being available, what happens when that's gone? Snapshots should only ever be a plan 'A'.
Snapshots, whilst could last for a very long time, you'd need an Andre the Giant sized fist full of capacity to keep several years worth of back data, and even still, if the primary is gone, you've got to rely on your synced data and snapshots on your remote site. What if the loss was mallicious and both primary and replicated are destroyed? Bug in the array code, internal or external hack, mis-configuration of snaps and replication, shipped corruption going back before your available snapshots. - all of these are just some of the reasons that snapshots alone should NOT be considered an alternative to snapshots, just as your first port of call in an event! Backups are your next buffer between recovery and a P45.
Backup provides an airgap for such an event.
Dedupe storage is not Backup. It is just expensive storage and extra bandwidth requirements.
The current definition of a purpose built backup appliance is obsolete. Obsolete.
The Data Domain model is being disrupted faster than most realize. Sending massive volumes of data over the network to be deduped by smart storage is 1990's era tech. Steve Foskett covered an angle on this not too long ago here. http://bit.ly/LETxEH
Some would argue that dedupe storage shouldn't be called an appliance at all as it needs to connect and work with backup technology like Avamar or Symantec NetBackup. For EMC to claim they have a real "Integrated Backup Appliance" they would need to tie together Avamar, DataDomain and probably some Networker. Even if they delivered that tomorrow, they would be well behind the state of the art and a couple hundred million behind on market share in that category.
The future of backup appliances is in integrated backup appliances or Unified Data Protection Appliances. These appliances integrate backup, media servers, source, media and target dedupe capabilities and in some cases security, HA and integrated encryption into an appliance or set of appliances.
Symantec and some smaller startups are making fast inroads here. (http://bit.ly/N9QtMJ)
o In the last 12 months Symantec has seen 250 percent growth in new appliance customers and 450 percent growth in the number of units shipped.
o Symantec appliance customers are coming back for more, with sales figures showing 40 percent of purchases from repeat customers.
· Even though the Symantec 5220 was introduced less than a year ago, it has won 3 awards in the last 8 months including the recent best of Microsoft Tech Ed.
· With just over 1 year in the appliance business Symantec has grown to have 3.5% of the IDC PBBA market – ahead of Quantum, Sepaton, Exagrid and other vendors with years of products in market
· IDC has split the PBBA market differentiating between target dedupe/VTLs and unified backup appliances like NetBackup / BE – this is not yet in the PBBA report, but is in other documents IDC makes available.
I sure skeptics will say, must be the law of small numbers. But, consider it this way, what enterprise tech company has ever taken a product tine from $0 to $200m in 18 months? I can't think of one.
EMC will not continue to enjoy almost no competition in the space. Frankly, it is the other way around. For those who want an integrated backup appliance and not just dedupe storage EMC is not an option. The onus is on the IT admin to put it all together into a single solution and that's the old model. If you are tired of being the glue between Avamar, Data Domain, Networker or NetBackup, integrated backup appliances are the way to go.
"For what EMC wanted to charge, I realized that I could get a bigger, better, faster, newer solution for less money by going with Symantec NetBackup appliances," http://bit.ly/MEUREZ
As for the replication discussion- Global management, policy and granular recovery of snapshots is the difference between data protection and simply having a lot of copies.
Note: this growth is happening in a segment not covered by backup software or purpose built backup appliance market coverage. http://bit.ly/N9QtMJ
Cheers,
@seanjregan (I work for the fastest growing vendor in the Unified Data Protection Appliance market)
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