Back up a minute. So you're saying they're buying fewer appliances?

Glory days... not really. IDC sees the purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) market shrinking in the third 2016 quarter, by almost 8 per cent on an annual basis, to $737.5mn. This is the market dominated by Dell EMC’s Data Domain products. And it seems to be affected, like storage arrays, by an enterprise buying slowdown. The …

[Roland_Bavington]

I think that another effect is the EU General Data Protection Regulation, it pretty much mandates encryption for data and de-dupe doesn't work on encrypted files because it makes two copies of the same file look completely different. So unless you just encrypt the whole PBBA with the same key (EMC's answer) which is definitely not best practice from a security point of view! So one of the principal reason's for PBBA's success, that De-dupe brought the price of disk tolerably close to tape goes away.

[Androgynous Cow Herd]

Simpler than that

Note that "Others" is growing. Most "Others" technologies have price point far lower than the legacy vendors. Miulti-million dollar VMax ops going instead to $200,000 worth of Nimble, for example, as just happened last week. Customer gets the same benefits and then some, just as many SANs out there as before, but the market just shrunk by over $2M overnight.

The buggy whip market is not what it once was either.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Simpler than that

Nimble might be landing some larger deals at the expense of some rivals, but it doesn't seem to be helping their valuation much. Sadly, Nimble could probably land all the $200k deals it wants, and they might never again be worth much more than $8 a share. Other competitors (Pure and Nutanix) are eating their lunch.

[Androgynous Cow Herd]

Re: Simpler than that

You may have missed the point, or perhaps my choice of vendor listed touched a nerve. You can lump both of those other vendors in the same boat as "Others" that are actually shrinking the storage market simply via their efficiency compared to the legacy providers.

[Stevie]

Bah!

I bet if you threw in a sexbot sales would bloom.

Mine's the Cherry 2000 in the shiny black French Maid outfit.

[Stevie]

Re: Bah!

Seriously? You want me to believe you wouldn't accept a free bonkbot from a vendor in a business where grown men typically start fights over free golf shirts and ball point pens given out at tech show booths, Mr Downvoter?

[agonzalez]

PBBA are great they provided a secure black box that you just pull in your infrastructure and start protecting your data.

Running you backup software on general purpose windows servers is less secure and can be hit by ransomware or other attacks that could make your data unrecoverable.

I have even seen people running backup software on Windows VM that is running on the same SAN storage as the workloads they are protecting, if they lost SAN they lost everything backups and production.

Years ago virtualization declined the number of physical servers sales because of consolidation, now with backup we can see similar trend where you have PBBA or backup storage sized smaller to retain only few months on-premise but you have a longer retention on cloud.