By Ann Silverthorn
March 26, 2007—A recent report from International Data Corp. (IDC) predicts that the worldwide data protection and recovery management (DPRM) market will grow from $58 million in 2006 to $200 million by 2011, representing a 28% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). The report, "Worldwide Data Protection and Recovery Management 2007-2011 Forecast and Analysis: Who's Who and Why It Matters," identifies disk-based backup and regulatory compliance as major drivers for DPRM.
The report, authored by Laura DuBois, IDC's research director for storage software, states, "DPRM in the context of monitoring, reporting, and management of heterogeneous data protection environments has seen continued adoption as firms deal with the challenges of meeting compressed service level agreements (SLAs), improving reliability and performance, managing storage costs, and dealing with compliance and corporate governance.
DuBois defines DPRM offerings as providing a global view of backup products, configurations, jobs, and assets. "DPRM products provide environmental statistics such as performance, utilization, success and failure data and, in many ways, provide functionality or information missing from the native backup application itself," according to DuBois.
To gather relevant backup data, DPRM products use native backup application interfaces, application programming interfaces (APIs), or command line interfaces (CLIs) to collect backup data. Once collected, the DPRM product attempts to normalize and/or parse the data, store it, and present it visually with graphical interfaces or reports. Some DPRM products use agents and some use a remote agent architecture.
As disk-based data protection becomes more popular, organizations will consolidate backup systems, but will also be left with heterogeneous data-protection configurations, which will necessitate "tools that can monitor, report on, and manage heterogeneous data protection configurations," according to the report.
In addition, to comply with government regulations and to streamline e-discovery, corporations demand stricter protection and recovery policies. IT departments will want to provide proof to auditors that data is adequately protected and can be recovered.
DPRM is not just for IT managers anymore. Capacity managers, for example, are using it to make better buying decisions. This means that reports should be accessible by both the technical and the business side of the organization.
Use cases for DPRM include performance tuning, troubleshooting, SLA monitoring, asset and configuration management, risk mitigation, chargeback and billing, and cost management.
Market drivers for DPRM products include heterogeneous environments, IT governance, electronic discovery on tape, disk-based data protection, focus on SLAs, and cost management, containment, and chargeback. Market inhibitors include consolidation of backup applications, integration of functions into storage grids, and adoption of common data-protection frameworks.
DuBois offers the following guidance for making DPRM product selections. In addition to agent versus agent-less architectures, IT managers should consider the breadth of third-party application support; implementation time and overhead; support for replicas, snapshots and clones; ease of use; and functionality. The report examines DPRM products from the following vendors: Agite Software AG, Aptare, Bocada, CA, Hewlett-Packard, Servergraph, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Tek-Tools, and WysDM.
For more detail on IDC's 31-page report, visit www.idc.com.
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