EMC, HP expand VTL portfolios

Having shipped more than 35PB of CLARiiON Disk Library (CDL) capacity, EMC has emerged as the early market leader in the virtual tape library (VTL) space. But other leading vendors, in particular, HP, are gaining market traction.

True, HP has a way to go to catch up to EMC on a petabyte-per-petabyte shipped comparison (HP hit the 5PB mark in April), but the company is building an impressive portfolio of products. Its new low-end VTL system -- the VLS1000i -- leverages technology from Overland. HP OEM's its higher-end VTLs from SEPATON.

While HP's VLS1000i is targeting the heart of the SMB market, EMC's new DL210 system is positioned a little higher at the mid-size enterprise/branch office level. The DL210 scales from 5TB to 24TB and lists from $50K. HP's VLS1000i, meanwhile, has 1.5TB of usable capacity (2TB raw) and is priced from $6K.

With EMC and HP in the driver's seat, I expect both products to be received well in their respective target markets. They're both natural evolutions or extensions of the VTL market.

And the survey says ...

We're kicking off another new ESG Research initiative. This time we're  looking at the increasingly popular -- and confusing -- topic of branch office optimization. It's a market opportunity we've sized to be about $1B plus.

So, why is it so confusing? Well, as I've been saying for several months now, delivering and protecting IT services to branch offices over a WAN can be slow, expensive, and complex. Enter WAFS, WAAS, WADS, WAN acceleration, WAN optimization. Whatever you call it, these solutions make this process easier and much more cost-effective for end-users. Simple enough, right?

But what about the data protection folks -- you know, vendors like Asigra, Avamar, Data Domain, Signiant, and Symantec? Where do they fit it? This is where it starts getting hazy.

Like the pure-play optimization guys, these vendors make it easier to move data over the WAN, but they are focused on data protection. And then there are folks like Kashya (okay, EMC now) that do a little of both: they do remote replication/CDP and WAN optimization.

Are these products competitive or complementary? What are the benefits of implementing one technology versus another? What are early adopters doing and what benefits are they seeing?

These are just some of the questions we'll answer in the upcoming survey. It's going to be jam-packed with helpful nuggets.

End-user weigh in on data archiving outsourcing

A journalist recently asked me what I think about outsourcing, specifically for backup. How viable an option is it? How big is it among end-users?

I think it's fair to say that end-user interest in this type of service remains small but for those who do it, it is often an invaluable resource -- especially when you consider the alternative of not adequately protecting your data.

Consider these two graphics from our freshly published report "Digital Archiving: Market Trends and Forecast 2006-2010." (Click on the thumbnails to open full-sized versions.) While ESG is not aware of any current outsourced options for on-line archiving of historical database tables (there are several vendors who do backup outsourcing), 15% of the end-users we surveyed would consider using an outsourced service to manage this process.

My guess is that this number would be slightly higher for backup outsourcing (probably in the 20-25% range) and the bulk of the interest would come from SMBs that lack the internal resources (e.g., capital and operational) to do backup effectively -- and efficiently -- themselves. The following figure lists some of the other benefits end-users see in database archiving outsourcing.

Interestingly, security concerns are still the primary reason end-users hesitate to outsource. True, outsourcing requires end-users to relinquish some aspects of "control" of their backup or digital archiving processes -- whatever the case may be -- but ESG believes these threats are more "perceived" risks than "real" risks.

A look back at last year's storage technologies

I've been feeling a little nostalgic latetly. Maybe it's because my one-year anniversary with ESG is fast-approaching? Or maybe it's because I'm a little homesick for New England (I've been in GA for about a year now too). Who knows for sure?

But what I do know is that I'm not the only one who experienced significant change last year. A quick look back at some of the the headlines that filled the pages of the industry's leading storage publications last year paints a picture of a very different storage world.

A year ago (while I was waiting for the last bit of snow to melt in my NH year), the industry was buzzing about SATA, ILM, iSCSI, and, yes, compliance. Today, I'm sipping sweet tea on an 80-degree day and I'm talking data de-duplication, CDP, recovery point objectives, and 3DR. Now, that's change!

Today, few peopole talk about SATA. It's just assumed that if you're talking low-cost primary or secondary disk storage, it's got SATA inside. As for ILM, do we really have to go there? And while were seeing increasing adoption of iSCSI, iSCSI as a technology has all but lost the attention of industry journalists. Compliance, meanwhile, is still "hot," but the focus isn't on the regulations themselves but on the technologies that enable organizations to meet them (e.g., what can I do to improve RTO/RPO objectives to better meet regulatory compliance and/or corporate governance requirements?

Heck, even SMBs aren't getting the attention they did a year ago. Instead, all eyes -- or most of them -- are on the billion-dollar ROBO market.

And you remember virtualization, the multi-year buzzword phenomenon, don't you? Well, that buzz is barely audible. (Btw, I disagree with this month's cover article in InfoStor. What hype? What debate?) While VMware is generating a lot of noise at the server level, storage virtualization has all but disappeared from the radar. Even IBM, which will announce its 2,000th SVC customer this week, has made little noise about storage virtualization this year.

If you've been reading my blogs (here and on the ComputerWorld website), then you know what I think this year's noisemakers will be, and unlike years past, I don't think these technologies are over-hyped. You'll be hearing a lot more about data de-duplication, CDP, and 3DR in the months ahead.