Report: Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Market Growth Surpasses Storage Software

While the market for purpose-built backup appliances had strong growth in the second quarter, sales of storage software rose an insignificant amount over last year, according to a couple of recent reports by analyst firm IDC.

Total worldwide sales of purpose-built backup appliances reached $657 million in the second quarter of 2012, up an impressive 29.8 percent over the $506 million reported in the second quarter of 2011, IDC reported this week.

However, the worldwide storage software market in the second quarter of 2012, which totaled $3.4 billion, rose an anemic 0.9 percent over last year.

[Related: VMworld 2012: Storage Takes Center Stage (Part 1) ]

IDC defines purpose-built backup appliances as stand-alone disk-based appliances, which include integrated software, disk arrays, one or more server engines, or nodes used either as a target for data from backup software applications or as part of a tightly integrated solution for cataloging, indexing, scheduling and performing data movement.

They can be purchased either as appliances with their own integrated storage capacity or as gateways accessing storage capacity on other arrays.

The strong growth in the purpose-built backup appliance market is significant in the context of the meager growth of the storage software market, especially the part of the storage software market most closely related to those appliances.

IDC reports that in the storage software market, sales of data protection and recovery software accounted for about $1.2 billion in revenue in the second quarter, or up about 2.4 percent over last year. Meanwhile, sales of archiving software rose 2.2 percent over last year to reach $404 million.

In the purpose-built backup appliance market, EMC is by far the leading vendor with a 62.2 percent market share. EMC, which sells its Data Domain and other backup appliances, revenue during the second quarter rose 22.4 percent to reach $409 million.

IBM was the second largest vendor with a 13.5 percent market share thanks in large part to sales of purpose-built backup appliances for its mainframes, IDC said. IBM enjoyed a 19.2-percent growth over last year to reach $88 million in revenue.

Symantec was by far the fastest-growing vendor in this part of the storage market due to sales of its NetBackup purpose-built backup appliance. Symantec, which until 2010 focused exclusively on storage software, saw its revenue hit $52 million, up a whopping 268.4 percent over a year ago.

NEXT: Rounding Out The Top Purpose-built Backup Appliance Vendors

HP, at number four with a 5.9 percent share of the market with $39 million in sales, enjoyed a strong 80.3-percent growth thanks to new appliances coupled with its StoreOnce deduplication technology, IDC said.

Rounding out the top five was Quantum, the only top vendor to experience a drop in sales over last year. Quantum's purpose-built backup appliance revenue slipped 7.0 percent to $14 million, IDC said.

In the storage software market, EMC was the top vendor with a 26.4 percent of the total worldwide revenue, followed by IBM with a 14.7-percent share and Symantec with a 14.6 percent share.

CommVault enjoyed the fastest growth in the storage software market, with sales in the second quarter up 21.5 percent over last year, IDC said. EMC was second with a 7.4-percent year-over-growth.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 25, 2012