Writing the Book on Virtual Backup

I am constantly looking for additional data on the markets, especially as it relates to markets served by NetBackup. I have access to the usual suite of products from industry analysts as well as our own internal intelligence and, of course, I monitor industry blogs, the press and a host of other data sources. One of the odder things I like to monitor is the book sales trends as published by O'Reilly. Today in their blog post, "State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 1: The Market" they published their findings from the most recent quarter and year. Not surprisingly they reported that 2008 was the worst year for the dataset they are tracking – although the decline was not as steep as it was in 2001 (which precedes their tracked data set). Although sales are down in general, there are some categories reporting significant positive "rate of change" is unit sales. The one category that is no surprise to me is the stand-out performance of the Virtualization category.

We see this phenomena every day as people use NetBackup to protect their virtual systems. Whether customers choose the high dedupe rates found by using PureDisk or the granular restore from a VCB backup, their virtual datacenter gets the same protection they have come to expect from NetBackup. It’s exciting to be able to have the market leading backup application for virtual machines.

Tim Burlowski

Technical Product Manager