We're building a wall and the over-30TB market is going to pay for it

Interview After our relatively crude attempt to segment the backup market, ExaGrid CEO Bill Andrews got in touch wanting to talk about their way of divvying up the market. What he described seemed a neat enough way of doing it, and far better than our three-group attempt. Bill is a say-it-as-he-sees-it guy who deals with …

[John Smith 19]

TL:DR. The journo does not understand the subject so he got someone who does to do so

I think El Reg should hire this guy.

He seems to know what he's talking about.

[unredeemed]

Reading in between the lines....

We want to be an enterprise play. We're tired of being an SMB play.

Those other players I mentioned in the SMB, we're above them. But we go against them the most since I know all of their names, even the obscure ones.

Large companies don't want cloud. They actually do, but we're just gonna plug our ears and shut our eyes for the moment. Cloud is so archaic.

Hey look at me, my landing space fancy JBOD is still relevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only part of the market ...

In the HPC world with ever growing data volumes the two main disk backup players are Seagate and DDN with tape players like IBM and Spektralogic still selling a lot of equipment. Although the disk-focussed players will always tell you tape is dead, there's still a lot out there and it fills a particular niche - cheap, reliable and power efficient.

So if you want to backup 10s of Pb of data you may not be looking to any of the companies that this article refers to ...

[@MarkCJordan]

Interesting article, but certainly written to position some companies as enterprise players and to marginalize others by declaring them niche or SMB players.

I work for Unitrends and we certainly see our many enterprise customers looking for what makes purpose-built, all-in-one backup and continuity appliances attractive; simplicity, one vendor, low TCO, and the ability to focus sparse IT human resources on activities that benefit an organization's ability to make money. No one wants to have a staff dedicated to a cobbled together backup solution.

This article points to an old world way of doing things. Pull together multiple vendors, build your own solution, manage your own DR data center, hope you can figure out who to call for support, and pray you have the budget to pay for everything. Larger and larger enterprises are moving to a new world, all-in-one approach and have no hesitation sending 100TBs of data and more to the vendor's cloud for compliance and continuity. We work with these customers every day.

[SniperPenguin]

Its funny they consider themselves above Veeam.....

Exagrid relies on Veeam for most of their faeture set nowadays.