BJ Jenkins is President of EMC’s back up and recovery unit. The business consists of selling ‘big fat SATA drives,’ purpose-built data center appliances and software management tools such as Avamar.

The only publicly issued figures are that Avamar and the Data Domain arm exited 2011 with a $2bn run rate.

Jenkins says his company has a ‘deep’ engagement with companies such as Rackspace, though he says that in the colocation sector “Savvis is one that hasn’t traditionally used our products but we hope they will”.

The conversations his division has with these companies are, he says, a mix of product, business and fi nancial. On products, he says they want backup that is secure, partitioned that they can provision and charge back.

“And for all of those we’re at various stages of development. Part of our announcement this week – feature additions to Data Domain and Avamar – are a step in the right direction for the service provider market,” he says.

A service provider ultimately wants to offer a particular service level at a faster backup at optimized cost. If there are ten customers and each wants to back up 1TB – “I can bring them together and compress it down to 7TB then I’ll save myself some money,” Jenkins says.

A growth area is purpose-built appliances: EMC has been trying to measure the backup market and there are three segments to focus on – data protection software growing at 5.6% CAGR, purpose-built appliances, growing at 21% (an estimated exabyte of data was shipped on purpose built appliances is last year) and tape, which declined at .7%.

Backup is changing onto deduped disk drives, for which EMC uses SATA drives to get capacity optimization. “Over 1,000 customers have gone tapeless for backup – the trend is away from tape,” Jenkins says.

The driver ultimately is that IT needs to deduplicate and recover at a much faster rate and greater value. And although drive prices continue to drop, Jenkins says the move to disk is more value driven than cost driven through price erosion.

As for the power profi le of his products, Jenkins says it is an input but not a primary input. “We get asked to provide information on power.

We do that as part of TCO. We don’t see it as a primary driver for our business. Customers want to migrate from tape to disk and go through deduplication, these far outweigh the power cost considerations,” he says.

Migrating from tape frees up floor space, and Jenkins says there are banks that have avoided capital investment in new data centers by migrating off tape and consolidating data back-up onto disk. “By eradicating tape drives they have not had to invest in new data center infrastructure,” he says.

The division’s road map is tighter integration with other EMC products, more integrated functionality with VMware and more appliance refreshes and software enhancements around Avamar and Data Domain.

Read the full report from EMC world in the current digital edition of DatacenterDynamics FOCUS. Issue 22.