Waves of technology have rocked the once-stable backup and recovery market, completely changing customer needs, says B.J. Jenkins, president of EMC Backup and Recovery. Speaking on SiliconAngle.TV from EMCWorld 2011 on Monday, May 9, Jenkins said that virtualization and big data in particular are creating complexity in the market forcing customers to adopt new backup strategies. As customers virtualize increasing numbers of applications their backup windows disappear and established practices blow up, for instance, forcing them to go to snapshot backup strategies. But while those have advantages in terms of speed, file-level recovery becomes much more complex.

As a result, he says, customers are looking to vendors like EMC to simplify their lives. “Our customers say, ‘That’s great, you have five products to cover any data situation. But that’s horrible – you have five products. Can’t you make it simpler.’ ”

This desire for simplicity is driving the appliance market, which Jenkins predicts will grow to $3 billion by 2015. Symantec, for instance, which traditionally was a software company, has now started selling appliances. And EMC is well positioned in that market with Avamar and DataDomain, which both have been around for four years.

But EMC is further simplifying by building interconnections between those five products so that customers do not have to make absolute decisions on one versus another. That started with the integration of DataDomain and Avamar, protecting the investments of customers who already have invested in those appliances, while allowing them to take advantage of the features of both rather than having to choose between them.  He promises that DataDomain will evolve to become the base storage and deduplication technology for all of EMC’s products.

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Another goal of EMC development is to bring easier, faster file-level recovery to its snapshot technology inside Avamar. That will give customers something approaching a best-of-both-worlds system that lets them move to snap shots for backups to meet the demands of virtualization without losing some of the most valuable aspects of the more traditional backup and restore environment, again simplifying technologies.

So overall, while the incumbent backup and recovery providers have long lived in a static marketplace, today that has changed. “We see backup and recovery as a dynamic marketplace with a lot of opportunity,” he says. “No matter where you are today, from enterprise storage to virtualization, to cloud and big data, you have to protect the information. So backup and recovery is basic technology. For us it is a matter of keeping ahead of those trends.”