WW Market of Backup Appliances Exceeds Tape, IDC

International Data Corporation has published a report: Worldwide Purpose-Built Backup Appliance 2011–2015 Forecast Update: Explosive Growth in 2011 by  Robert Amatruda (14 pages, $4,500). Here is an abstract of the report.

The worldwide purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) market experienced explosive growth in the first half of 2011.

It totaled $1.2 billion for the first half of 2011. In addition, we expect the total full-year 2011 worldwide PBBA revenue will exceed our initial forecast by a wide margin, to reach nearly $2.8 billion. This is well above our initial worldwide PBBA revenue forecast of $2.1 billion earlier this year.

The exceptional growth is due to increased use and customer adoption of PBBA systems for backup, recovery, and storage optimization with the use of data deduplication. We believe the customer drivers for increased investment in PBBA solutions result from the need to improve backup window time, to provide faster restore and recovery times, and to enable seamless integration with existing backup applications. As a result, customers are aggressively moving away from tape-based backup and recovery processes.

At midyear 2011, the worldwide PBBA market value exceeded that of the worldwide branded tape market, which includes tape drives and automation products. This trend will continue for the foreseeable future as customers take advantage of the PBBAs rich feature sets, particularly for virtual server protection, rapid recovery, and data deduplication. However, tape will still be used and deployed alongside PBBA systems in customer environments primarily as an archive platform.

In the first half of 2011, EMC remained the revenue share leader, commanding 62.0% of the $1.2 billion spent on PBBA solutions. IBM and HP followed, with 20.7% and 3.2% revenue share, respectively. In addition, EMC held the top share position in terms of total worldwide PBBA capacity, with 63.5% of the raw terabytes shipped. HP held 8.9% of the total worldwide PBBA capacity shipped, while IBM held 7.7% for the same period.

                                WW Purpose-Built Backup Appliance
                                         Revenue by Vendor, 1H11

 
(Source: IDC, 2011)

                               WW Purpose-Built Backup Appliance
                                         Capacity by Vendor, 1H11

 
(Source: IDC, 2011)

The worldwide PBBA market totaled nearly $1.7 billion in 2010. In addition, there were 467,569TB of raw capacity shipped during the same period. We anticipate the worldwide PBBA market is on course to total $2.8 billion for the full year of 2011.

We expect the total worldwide PBBA revenue will grow robustly with a  CAGR of 25.6%, totaling nearly $5.3 billion by the close of 2015. Furthermore, we expect rapid growth in capacity shipped for PBBA solutions as customers continue to forego investments in their tape infrastructure. We anticipate total capacity shipped will increase at a 47.6% CAGR, totaling nearly 3.3EB at the close of 2015.