Speedy backup market heats up

06 Jun 2012

Battle between HP and EMC focuses on deduplication-rate claims and counter-claims.

The company announced an update to its StoreOnce software technology, named Catalyst, and claimed it was capable of ingesting a massive 100 terabytes (TB) of data per hour, when combined with HP’s B6200 backup array.

“Today represents the essential completion of our vision of federated deduplication,” said David Scott, general manager for HP storage, who went on to claim that this combination was “three times faster” than EMC DataDomain’s highest performing platform. He was referring to EMC’s mid-May announcement at EMC World 2012 of its Data Domain DD990 equipment, capable of ingesting and deduplicating data at a rate of up to 31TB per hour.

EMC has since hit back at HP’s claims, arguing that the comparison is not fair. HP’s 100TB claim, it says, envisages a scenario where four hardware systems are working on four storage pools and compares the results against EMC’s figures for one system and one pool. "We find it incredibly puzzling why HP would put out these ridiculous claims of leapfrogging," Rob Emsley, EMC's senior director of product marketing, told ZDNet UK.

These claims aside, companies continue to find significant advantages to using deduplication in their backup procedures, primarily because of the cost savings associated with reduced disk capacity requirements. That’s allowing some to extend disk-based backup to workloads where they have previously used tape.

 Systems such as HP’s StoreOnce and EMC’s DD990 incorporate deduplication at the heart of their technology. IDC calls these devices ‘purpose-built-backup appliances’, or PBBAs. Revenue in this market, it estimates, totaled $2.4 billion in 2011 – a 43 percent increase year over year. EMC led the field at the end of 2011, with a market share of 65.5 percent, followed by IBM with 15.3 percent and HP with 4.1 percent.

In addition, EMC held the top share position in terms of total worldwide PBBA capacity, with 64.7 percent of the raw terabytes shipped. IBM held 9.2 percent of the total worldwide capacity shipped, while HP held 8/9 percent. Other companies in this market include Quantum, Oracle, Fujitsu and Dell. Overall, the analyst firm expects the market to reach about $5.9 billion by the end of 2016.

 “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,” wrote IDC analyst Robert Amatruda in a recent report on the market. “As a result, customer continue to aggressively move away from tape-based backup and recovery processes. This trend will continue for the forseeable future as customers take advantage of PBBA’s rich feature sets, particularly for virtual server protection, rapid recovery and data deduplication.”

 Meanwhile, new applications for deduplication are emerging: some analysts, for example, predict that it will increasingly be used not just for backup, but also to meet primary data storage requirements. NetApp pioneered this approach as far back as five years ago, with its Advanced Single Instance Storage (A-SIS) technology. As yet, however, primary data deduplication has yet to make its mark on the wider storage industry, where the biggest challenge remains getting it to work at large scale without taking a significant hit in I/O [input/output] performance.

 One other area of interest for deduplication vendors is solid state storage, where potentially, the cost of media is at such a premium that even a relatively small efficiency improvement would justify investment for many IT teams.

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