The principal storage market that Permabit addresses, with the aptly named Permabit Enterprise Archive appliance, is the area of enterprise archive. Analyst George Crump does a great job explaining this market and its requirements in his white paper The Enterprise Archive Defined, but I’ll take a crack at a brief summary here.
Enterprises today are faced with tremendously growing storage requirements. Any market analyst (or, better yet, scientifically conducted survey) will tell you that storage requirements in enterprise are growing between 40% and 60% yearly. This is driven by many factors (regulatory requirements, data mining, modernization of business, higher resolution media, etc.), but it all comes down to wanting and needing to store more stuff.
Most of this stuff goes right onto primary storage, at a cost of $30 to $50 a gigabyte. It also gets put into the backup stream, at an overall cost (considering how many copies are eventually made) of another few dollars per GB. At current growth rates, the average mid-size enterprise needs millions of dollars more primary storage per quarter, but IT budgets are certainly not keeping up. (more…)
