Modern Data Protection

Chapter 14. Traditional Data Protection Solutions

The data protection industry has evolved quite a bit in the past few decades. Each type of data protection solution discussed in this (and the following) chapter was designed to address what it saw as limitations and challenges of the solutions that preceded it in the market and/or challenges that were created by inflection points in the market (e.g., VMware, cloud).

The backup industry is a bit unique in that products we designed 10 or 20 years ago still have many happy customers. There have certainly been waves, starting with what I’m now calling traditional backup products that owned 100% of the market 20 years ago, followed by the virtualization-centric products gaining market share at their expense. Then there have been other waves of products, such as the hyper-converged and backup-as-a-service offerings, and those targeted at backing up IaaS/SaaS products. Whereas each wave also created its own following, many (if not most) of those who moved to those products have stayed with them. So the backup market today comprises a mix of products and services, some of which came out last year and some have been in the industry longer than I have.

I’ll be explaining all these categories in the only way I know how: by telling you the story of how they got here. This story starts a long time ago with traditional backup products. They were developed because people like me were pulling out our hair trying to back up hundreds of Unix systems ...