IDC sees huge growth in disk-based backup

According to an IDC press release,  a just-published report titled "Disk-based Data Protection - 2006" finds that disk-based backup solutions will account for

$8 billion in user IT spending in 2006 and is poised to generate more than $50 billion in software and hardware purchases through 2010. This explosive growth is fueled by increasing regulatory compliance, business continuity, and fast recovery, the disk-based data protection market will continue to expand at a rate two to three times faster than the overall storage market.

We began to notice about three years ago that a set of our customers were taking our data replication products and using them outside of failover clusters.  These customers just wanted a faster, cheaper, more secure way to get a copy of their critical data onto a backup disk and had figured out that real-time replication was the best approach.  With network speeds increasing, replication engines getting more efficient and disk prices falling, this is a natural evolution of the backup process. 

Eventually, backup tapes will be obsolete.  All data protection will occur either:

• via CDP to a disk either within the local data center (perhaps a dedicated backup server) or across a WAN link (for full disaster recovery)
• via electronic vaulting using an online hosted service or in-house
• via virtual tape archiving

The economics of tape just don't make sense any longer.   The labelling, the rotating, the sequential searches..... those days are gone.