TheInfoPro

Written by Marco Coulter, Research Director for Storage

This Thursday’s TIP is based on a real-time update extracted with 71 in-depth interviews complete. Last Thursday’s TIP, we looked at 2011 budgets. This time, we look at how vendors will experience the closing quarter of the calendar year. How successful will vendors be in the Q4 CY11?

Brocade, Hewlett-Packard and EMC show the largest numbers planning spending in Q4, playing to their respective fiscal years. IBM goes against this model, with spending predominantly occurring by the end of Q2, possibly indicating overflow from the prior year coming into the first quarters of this year.

Symantec delivers evenly, with 80% spending evenly through the year. Before assuming that software delivers more balanced revenue than hardware, consider that the other listed software player, CommVault, has the lowest number of respondents indicating even spending. It is likely that Symantec sees more renewal revenue as the “gorilla” in the protection segment, while CommVault’s business is more new clients making initial commitments.

HDS goes significantly against the fiscal year “hockey stick” model. Thirty-six percent (36%) of storage professionals reviewing HDS planned their spending in Q3, well after the company’s fiscal year is concluded. HDS and NetApp look to have the least Q4 spending plans among our respondents.
Below is a table of the months that the listed companies conclude their fiscal years:
Fiscal Year End for Charted Storage Companies

March – Symantec, CommVault, HDS
April- NetApp
October – Brocade, HP
December – EMC, IBM

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Written by Marco Coulter, Research Director for Storage

The overall storage market grew during 2011, with TheInfoPro’s Wave 15 Storage Study indicating 43% increasing spending and only 26% reducing spending. EMC reported year-over-year Q3 growth of 16%, leading to our titular question.

During EMC’s recent earnings call, EMC EVP and CFO David Goulden said, “Our storage portfolio has been taking share in both the midtier and the high end.” TheInfoPro’s research reflects this. The pie chart below shows that at the start of this year, 5% of customers rating EMC were new to EMC in the past 12 months.

Having chosen EMC, storage professionals discussed what led to their choice:

• “We switched because of] vendor support, software feature set, speed of access and delivery of data.” – storage pro at a large-enterprise industrial/manufacturing company
• “EMC is a true full-service company, from storage to virtualization – good, well-integrated support and services.” – storage pro at a large-enterprise healthcare/pharmaceuticals company

The chart above shows the vendors the new EMC customers were leaving. IBM appears to have lost the most clients here, followed by NetApp and HDS. However, narrative commentary clarifies that the rebranded NetApp filers sold through IBM were the product being replaced:

• “Performance and behavior of applications add up with VMAX. We couldn’t do sync replication with nSeries.” – storage pro at a large-enterprise materials/pharmaceuticals company

While EMC is picking up new clients, it’s also losing some existing customers to competitors. Not all opinions are so positive:

• “EMC still has a good, stable tier one storage offering. That is all I can say from a positive standpoint. Its support has gone downhill, and the software is still buggy. I even see reporting as being a problem. Since the support is no longer what it used to be, there is no longer any real competitive advantage to owning EMC products.” – storage pro at a large-enterprise energy/utilities company

The past five years saw significant vendor consolidation in the storage market, but for startups and mature vendors, there are still opportunities to displace market leaders.

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Written by Daniel Kennedy, Research Director for Information Security

Far and away, the choice of both large and midsize enterprises for the most exciting vendor this wave in terms of products and services was next generation firewall maker Palo Alto Networks. The application-aware firewall or next generation firewall, a fusion of the capabilities of stateful and application firewalls, is generating a good buzz amongst respondents: “Palo Alto’s probably the most innovative I’ve dealt with, specifically their application discovery or app[lication] identity.”

The second most exciting vendor in aggregate (full sample) is FireEye with its advanced malware detection solutions, buoyed strongly by responses amongst midsize enterprises. Rounding out the list of exciting vendors are industry stalwarts EMC (RSA), Symantec, and Intel (McAfee).

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIP reports when they are fist released? Sign up here for TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

The application-aware firewalls also lead the network security pack with a heat score of 62, and a 28% in use figure that could jump 33% based if pilots and near-term plans come to fruition. Of the respondents with application-aware firewalls on their roadmaps, 39% of respondents see their organizations spending more in 2012, with Palo Alto Networks seeing the lion’s share of the benefit. If the company can convert on long-term implementation plans by respondents’ enterprises, it could carve out a healthy niche of a firewall market currently dominated by Cisco and Check Point in our studies.

Anti-botnet solutions have had a warmer reception amongst the midsize enterprises, while 14% have a solution in place, another 14% have an implementation in their plans down the road, with FireEye looking to benefit. Still, the technology appears not ready for prime time, with 73% of midsized enterprises reporting no plans for integrating these products.

What do respondents have to say on the top two exciting vendors?

• “Palo Alto – I like their mobile solutions.”
• “We’ve looked at FireEye and haven’t formed any opinion about whether to move forward.”
• “Palo Alto – next generation, not tied to traditional monitoring, but threat ID allows you to make rules more granular.”
• “We are very impressed with FireEye’s approach. In that space, other vendors will catch up.”
• “[Palo Alto does] a single pass instead of Fortinet’s multiple proxy, which hammers the resources and doesn’t give enough granularity in reporting. It’s a more cohesive design.”
• “FireEye’s virtual machine-based detection system for malware. It anticipates malware and tells you what may likely be malware before you can get signatures out.”

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High Profile Breaches and Mobile Devices are key spending drivers according to a report authored by Daniel Kennedy, former Wall Street Chief Information Security Officer and now Research Director for Information Security at TheInfoPro

NEW YORK, November 17, 2011 – TheInfoPro, a division of leading analyst and data company The 451 Group, recently released the findings from its bi-annual study of the Information Security market, where the source of the data is in-depth, one-on-one interviews with over 150 decision-makers in the Global 2000. Key findings include: …

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Written by Marco Coulter, Research Director for Storage

Shiny new things can distract the storage industry. Occasionally, we need to step back and observe the complete environment to see what is really going on. Take backup as an example.

There are new vendors coming into the cloud backup market all the time, like Druva (inSync Cloud), Asigra, Zmanda, Carbonite, Unitrends (Vault2Cloud), and far too many to fully list. At the same time, traditional vendors are adding connectors to allow backup to the cloud, such as in the latest release of CA’s ARCserve R16 or EMC’s Mozy. Each focuses on different strengths: consumer ease of use; file synchronization; on-premise caching; using Amazon S3 as a store; providing their own store; agentless; application-aware agents. Only 1% of backup capacity is currently going to cloud backup, yet it is definitely a discussion point.

• “We are looking to move our backup to the cloud.”
  – storage pro at a large-enterprise healthcare/pharmaceuticals company

• “EMC’s Mozy – it’s similar to eSilo – appliance driven, offsite – but they’ve developed specific agents. They’ve also done well to centralize management. Good management console, with robust reporting capability. Cheaper than eSilo, too.”
  – storage pro at a large-enterprise telecom/technology company

With all this activity, you may think cloud is taking over as predominant destination for backup. Nothing could be further from the truth. Tape has proven itself a known quantity over decades of retention, much as parchment is still used for recording laws in the UK parliament. Tape still owns backup and averages 68% of capacity in enterprises.

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIPs the minute they are released on a complimentary basis? Then join TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

Of course, much of this data is written once and will never be touched again as long-term archives. This massive capacity is one of the significant inhibitors to switching backup vendors.

• “[Switching means] we would have to maintain two sets for backups for a period of time.” – storage pro at a large-enterprise industrial/manufacturing company
• “[Switching would be] very hard – all the tape libraries we have and backup schedules we develop. It would take a lot of time.”
  – storage pro at an MSE industrial/manufacturing company

Despite this legacy inhibitor, tape can be so painful to manage that many are trying to minimize or replace it wherever possible. Backup data reduction/deduplication has been the hottest technology in our Storage Management Technology Heat Index™ for multiple studies. Commonly replacing writing to tape in the short term, it still only accounts for 12% of overall backup capacity.

• “[We're] eliminating tape from backup process.”
  – storage pro at a large-enterprise industrial/manufacturing company

• “[We're] looking to a tape-free backup at this point.”
  – storage pro at an MSE healthcare/pharmaceuticals company

When it comes to exciting products, it may be less about the destination and more about the integration with the source that captures attention. Support of virtual machines may be becoming the key criteria for evaluation of backup solutions.

• “Whatever newest VM backup technology is, that’s exciting.” – storage pro at a large-enterprise transportation company
• “Avamar’s deduplication story does nice things for my virtual machines.”
  – storage pro at an MSE consumer goods/retail company

• “Actifio goes into storage fabric and lets you make a snapshot of backup for virtual machines. It also replaces vRanger.” – storage pro at an MSE education organization

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