Apart from hybrid and all-flash arrays, another bright spot in the declining market for enterprise storage systems the backup appliance. According to the latest data from IT research firm International Data Corporation’s (IDC), the purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) market posted a 6.2 percent year-over-year gain on sales of $762.2 during the first quarter (Q1) of 2016.

Non-mainframe open PBBA revenue was up 8.3 percent year over year for a total of $703.2 percent. Meanwhile, sales of mainframe backup appliances dipped 13.9 percent, said IDC.

And as data volumes grow in the enterprise, so do the capacity requirements to back them up. In Q1, backup appliance makers shipped a total of 886 petabytes of backup storage space, a 36.7 percent year-over-year increase.

IDC research manager and storage analyst Liz Conner observed that the market “picked up in 2016 where it left off in 2015, posting solid year-over-year growth in the first quarter,” in a statement. In the fourth quarter of 2015 backup appliance markers helped end the year on a high note by hauling in over a billion dollars.

“PBBA software revenue saw double-digit growth year over year while the value from storage hardware remained flat,” continued Conner. “The greater emphasis on meeting recovery objectives, ease of use, and the ability to tier to the cloud is helping to drive the focus on software as well as the overall evolution of PBBA systems.”

EMC was the top backup appliance provider in Q1, claiming a 56 percent share of the market on $427 million in sales.

During an April 20 conference call to discuss the storage giant’s first-quarter earnings, David Goulden, CEO of EMC’s Information Infrastructure division, noted that Data Domain, the company’s deduplication-focused data protection product portfolio, “continues to lead the market with a Q4 2015 market share of over 60 percent.” Demand for the company’s Data Domain systems “was up 20 percent during Q1,” he added.

Veritas (formerly a Symantec business) took the number two spot with $138.9 million in revenue and 18.2 percent market share. HP Enterprise (HPE) and IBM were statically tied for third place, after generating $34.6 million and $30 million in sales during Q1, respectively. Dell rounds out the top five with $24.6 million and just over 14 percent of the market.

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