News

posted on 08 April 2008 16:42

IDC has analysed the removable hard disk drive (R-HDD) market and given ProStor and its RDX product a 90 percent market share.

The IDC report, entitled, “Worldwide Removable Hard Disk Drive 2008-2012 Forecast and Analysis: The Quest for a Viable Tape Replacement,” says R-HDDs are gaining in popularity at small and medium businesses (SMB) across the globe as tape backup replacements.

IDC divides the R-HDD market into commercial and consumer sections. For the purpose of market sizing, analysis and forecast though, it combines the two sectors. The forecast is for the R-HDD market to grow in excess of 1,400 percent from 2007 to 2012 and be then worth $500 milllion.

ProStor's RDX product (pictured above), based on 2.5-inch hard disk drives, is classed by IDC as a commercial sector product. So far, more than 65,000 end users world-wide have deployed 180,000 RDX cartridges to backup their servers and protect their data.

The RDX is OEM'd by Dell, which sells a large number of drives each month, and also by Imation and Tandberg Data. The latter firm is struggling to recover from the brink of bankruptcy and RDX sales must be an area it will concentrate on as it tries to recover.

Other commercial R-HDDs include Quantum's GoVault and two Imation products known as Odyssey and Ulysses. The poor showing of these three products is not unexpected given ProStor's superior channel infrastructure and its development of an RDX InfiniVault autoloader (pictured).

For example, ProStor has signed up more than 30 VARs in its ProAlliance Partner program for InfiniVault in just five months. These VARs are involved in finance, government, healthcare and legal, to name a few sectors.

Robert Amatruda, an IDC research director, said, “ProStor’s approach of driving a de facto industry standard with multiple sources has helped RDX technology gain significant OEM adoption.” This perhaps suggests why competing commercial R-HDD products have made minimal headway.

Iomega's REV product is classed as a consumer-grade product by IDC. It is surprising that it has not made more of a showing in the market share numbers.

Steve Georgis, ProStor's CEO and president, was delighted with the IDC finding, saying: “RDX technology has received overwhelmingly positive support from OEM partners, storage software vendors and the general public.”

Regarding InfiniVault, ProStor states 'InfiniVault provides users with a digital archive solution that reduces storage costs by combining long-term data retention, regulatory compliance, automated data archiving and e-discovery protection in a single, simple-to-deploy and easy-to-use appliance.'

All this looks like a pretty commanding lead. SMBs are being regaled with online backup offers from EMC (Mozy), Carbonite, the new HP Upline, and others. For those that don't want to have to rely on their Internet connection being up when they need to restore files, and who need the speed of disk to cope with shrinking backup windows, then RDX technology is pretty much the standard choice.

We might well expect further OEM deals and, perhaps, possible software additions to RDX to increase the strength of its archive offering.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}