A Vision for Converged Backup Infrastructure

Featured blog by Matt Cain, SVP of Appliance Solutions, Symantec

IT is evolving at an accelerated pace today, thanks in large part to virtualization, cloud computing and big data. While these trends can lower costs and increase efficiency, they are too often delivered via point products that offer only marginal improvements to the traditional approach.

Take Data Domain as an example. It tackles the data volume problem with just deduplication (an infrastructure-centric approach), but misses the larger, more strategic opportunity to simplify and interpret the information (a broader management approach).

Customers have told us they derive more value from managing their information than from managing their infrastructure. We took that input and pioneered a new approach, delivering the integrated, purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) that combined the intelligence of NetBackup with compute, network and storage resources – allowing for faster deployment, lower cost of ownership and enhanced resiliency with greater performance. The powerful result: managing the information instead of the infrastructure.

Today, we’re excited to announce the new NetBackup 5330 appliance, with up to 229TB capacity and twice the backup performance of previous models. This builds on our recently released expansion arrays and doubled deduplication pool capacity, which gave our existing NetBackup appliance customers room to grow. Customers now have the freedom to deploy information management through any one of our family of large-scale integrated appliances, placing infrastructure concerns as secondary.

Here are four data points that demonstrate the market’s validation of our approach:

– IDC reports¹ that Symantec continues to be the fastest growing player in this space.

– In only four years, customers have adopted and deployed more than 10,000 NetBackup appliances all across the globe.

– In Symantec’s most recent fiscal quarter report, the NetBackup appliance business has posted over 35% revenue growth – in an industry Gartner says is growing 6.8%².

– IDC’s Robert Amatruda³ states: “We believe that integrated PBBA systems will be the engine of growth [vs. target appliances] as customers look to deploy turnkey, easy-to-use, and easy-to-manage solutions. In addition, we expect PBBA solutions, particularly integrated PBBAs, to provide channel partners with a vehicle to add more value-added services such as hosted services and cloud options.”

Our customers’ need for insight about their information is what inspired us to build a brand-new integrated appliance business from the ground up, and rocket into the #2 market position⁴. And we’re not stopping with just backup. Symantec is uniquely able to help our customers collect and make sense of their information. Our portfolio provides insight into application availability, backup and recovery, archive and eDiscovery – in short, across the entire information management lifecycle. And like it or not, today’s IT runs an information management business that demands smarter decisions made faster than ever before.

1) IDC Worldwide Quarterly Purpose Built Backup Appliance Tracker – 2013 Q4, Publication Date: 3/21/2014

2) Gartner Market Share Analysis: Enterprise Distributed System Backup/Recovery Software Market, Worldwide, 2013, Publication Date: 5/14/2014

3) IDC Worldwide Purpose-Built Backup Appliance 2013 Vendor Analysis, Publication Date: 07/25/2013

4) IDC Worldwide Quarterly Purpose Built Backup Appliance Tracker – 2014 Q2, Publication Date: 9/18/2014