As organisations cope with data growth and look to gain greater operational efficiency and increased value from IT investments, ExaGrid has identified the following trends as ones that will continue transforming backup and recovery in the coming year:
1) Disk continues to replace tape: The movement away from tape as a primary backup target to disk-based systems with deduplication as a primary backup target will accelerate. The market for purpose-built disk backup appliances will approach $3 billion dollars in annual revenues, according to IDC.
Appliances will continue to be the preferred form factor for this movement.
2) SMBs looking to the cloud for primary backups: Small businesses across all industries will continue to turn to a series of cloud providers for their end-to-end backup needs, including using the cloud as the primary backup target.
3) Mid-market to enterprise will consider cloud for DR: Mid-market to enterprise companies will begin to investigate selective use of the cloud for storing disaster recovery copies of their backup data.
These enterprises recognise the cloud cannot serve as the primary target (as it can for small business) due to the logistics of initial backup and subsequent recoveries.
Initially, the cloud will serve as a repository for lower priority data and longer term archiving of backup.
4) Instant recovery will gain broader adoption: Data protection software products will continue to bring innovative features to market that allow customers to instantly leverage their disk-based backups in production in the event of failure, versus going through prolonged restore procedures.
Users will benefit from significantly reduced downtime—typically in minutes with instant recovery from disk backup, instead of hours—and therefore increased productivity.
Instant recovery of virtual machines is a key example of this growing trend.
5) Advanced capabilities bring backup window relief: IT professionals will continue to leverage features that reduce the need to move full copies of data during backups, providing continued relief to the backup window problem.
Use of synthetic techniques to create full recovery points will continue, driving increased adoption of deduplication in disk-based backup storage appliances.
Dave Therrien, Chief Technical Officer and Founder of ExaGrid: “Organisations that are focused on implementing new backup approaches that can scale to accommodate data growth rates of 30 percent or more – while keeping total system costs low to protect IT budgets – will be best positioned for this period of rapid change. Based on the convergence of each of these important trends in 2013, organisations can no longer look at backup and recovery as a lower priority data center initiative.”