Backup & Archiving Market Report

Overview

According to IDC, enterprises data is expected to grow to 93 Zettabytes by 2025. About 80% of that data is secondary data in the form of files, objects, and backups. Primary storage typically only comprises 20% of overall capacity. The remaining 80% consists of secondary storage that covers all your secondary use cases, including backup, archiving, file and object storage, dev/test, analytics, private and public cloud.

As the primary storage market leaders stablized from a spending perspective, the secondary storage market (refers to storage systems for data protection, backup and so on) has seen a big total addressable market (TAM) expansion, with companies like Cohesity® and Rubrik® expanding the notion of data protection from backup into data management, analytics and security.

Secondary storage infrastructure is fragmented across a patchwork of point appliances, including deduplication appliances, backup servers, cloud gateways, NAS, and data

lakes. This approach is complex: each needs to be provisioned, configured, managed and updated through its own proprietary UI and processes. Data must be copied and stored across the silos, with enterprises keeping an average of 10 to 15 redundant copies of data across silos. Enterprises need a simpler, more efficient way to manage their ever- increasing volumes of data.

Cloud Adoption

The number of organizations committed to or interested in a hybrid cloud solutions has increased from 81% to 93% since 2017. 89% of organizations still expect to have a meaning on-premises footprint in three years.

Over the past 10 years, storage evolved around two very different directions. Traditional enterprise storage, such as Dell® and HPE®, focused on providing standardized file interfaces (NFS and SMB), on ‘scale-up’ hardware, and snapshots for resiliency. On the other hand, cloud storage, developed by hyperscale companies like Google and Amazon, focused on delivering scale-out solutions on commodity hardware, strong resiliency to hardware failures, but relying on proprietary protocols and APIs for data access.

Cloud solutions is increasing rapidly for its agility, scalability and lower costs. The price for archiving could be as low as 0.1 cents per GB per month. Therefore, the vendors in the market are increasingly offering cloud-based solutions to manage data.

Cloud also provides advanced services, such as machine learning, analytics, and data pipelines, so that customers can use “in place” with their data in cloud.

What enterprises need today is the best of both solutions. They need to support standardized interfaces like NFS and SMB protocols, to interoperate with existing applications. They need to save critical data “in house” for security and compliance reasons. But they have also need to move to software-defined, web-scale solutions on commodity hardware, just like cloud storage. Web-scale provides multiple advantages like ‘pay-as-you-grow’ consumption, always-on availability, simpler management, and lower costs.

INDUSTRY TRENDS

IDC survey shows the market appears to be in the midst of a transition, with growth coming from integrated appliances and software-defined (virtual) instances in cloud environments[6]. Cloud solutions are one of the most comprehensive tools against cyber-attacks and data breaches. However, if mis- managed, it may pave the way for the attackers to seamlessly enter the database stored on the backup server and use it against the user. Hence, the privacy and security issues act as a major hindrance to the adoption of cloud backup solutions.

Hybrid Cloud

Major enterprise storage vendors provide hybrid cloud solutions for users to take advantage of both enterprise storage and cloud. The data can be saved in local storage or cloud or both for different purposes. A virtual appliance can be run in cloud to help data mobility.

Major storage vendors such as Dell® supports copy data to cloud for different uses cases:

•  Tiering supports cold data bursting to cloud. Cold data are automatically stored in the cloud. Once they become hot, they will be tiered back to private appliances.
•  Cloud archiving enables long-term archival to the cloud, providing a more manageable alternative to tape.
•  Cloud replication provides replication with virtual appliances running in the cloud.
•  Recovery in the public cloud: Today, leading backup vendors support restoring backup data to servers in the public cloud. The backup data can also be used for test/development purposes in the public cloud. Enterprises utilizes multiple public cloud services from different cloud provider. For example, backup solutions may support cloud integration for tiering, archival, and replication to public cloud services such as Google Cloud Storage Nearline, Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3/Glacier. Secondary storage vendors may need to support multi- cloud solutions for enterprises.

Comprehensive Appliances

Second, secondary storage infrastructure is fragmented across different point appliances and clouds, including deduplication appliances, backup servers, archiving appliance, cloud gateways, etc. The complexity also comes from multiple software and management tools. To reduce the complexity and improve efficiency, secondary storage vendors address this issue with comprehensive appliance for all the use cases. Cohesity® is among the vendors that first came up with the concept.