EMC, now a part of Dell Technologies, was the leading vendor in a growing backup storage systems market last quarter, according to the latest figures from research firm IDC.

In the second quarter (Q2) of 2016, sales of purpose-built backup appliances grew 11.5 percent year-over-year to reach $871.1 million. By comparison, vendors generated $781.6 million in sales in Q2 2015.

A purpose-built backup appliance, according to IDC’s definition, is “a standalone disk-based solution that utilizes software, disk arrays, server engine(s), or nodes that are used for a target for backup data and specifically data coming from a backup application (e.g., NetWorker, NetBackup, TSM, and Backup Exec) or can be tightly integrated with the backup software to catalog, index, schedule, and perform data movement.” It can be deployed as a gateway or as a standalone system.

Open systems revenue climbed to $787.6 million, up 12 percent on a year-over-year basis. Even after three quarters of year-on-year declines, the mainframe backup systems segment bounced back with a 6.2 percent gain, said IDC.

Liz Conner, research manager at IDC’s Storage Systems practice, said part of the reason for the uptick is that vendors are doing a better job of delivering products that solve the backup challenges faced by enterprises.

“The [purpose-built backup appliance] market posted a strong performance in the first half of 2016. Responding to end-user pain points, vendors continue to improve their product portfolios with greater emphasis on automation, simplified management tools, improved RPO/RTOs [recovery point objectives/recovery time objectives], and the ability to tier to the cloud,” said Conner in a statement.

Another big reason: Businesses are producing more data, raising demand for backup systems. In total, vendors shipped 1 exabyte of purpose-built backup appliance capacity in Q2, a 35.3 percent increase compared to the same year-ago quarter.

EMC unsurprisingly led the market with over a half-billion dollars in revenue ($538.4 million) and a 61.8-percent share of the market. During the EMC World conference in May, the company unveiled new cloud-enabled backup solutions and new VCE Data Protection Appliances that include Data Domain and EMC data protection software and slash deployment times by up to 75 percent, the company claimed.

Veritas was a distant second with $115.6 million in sales and 13.3 percent of the market. IBM took third place with $49 million in sales and 5.6 percent of the market. HP Enterprise (HPE) and Dell rounded out the top five with sales of $32.1 million and $25.2 million, respectively.