Brother watermelon did not attend the US Flash Summit this year, so everyone will not see my live report this year. However, I may attend the China Flash Memory Summit to be held in Nanjing this year at the end of the month, and there may be a speech on how to seize the GenAI outlet for storage entrepreneurship.

After watching the news in the past two days, Gartner released the Magic Quadrant of backup in 2024. Huawei, a Chinese manufacturer, was almost shortlisted, and the combination of backup software and GenAI also became the focus.

As usual, share the original report first. If you like your own research, you can scan the original report. If your English is not good, you can use WeChat to translate it.

If you don't want to read the original text, come and listen to my nagging. I will briefly talk about my learning experience.

This time in the year of 2024 《 enterprise Backup and recovery software solution Magic Quadrant report, no new shortlisted suppliers have been added, Acronis is excluded because it focuses on giving priority to MSP and edge/endpoint device workloads, resulting in its failure to meet the inclusion criteria.

But there are three events that I think deserve your attention.

First of all, what attracts my attention is the combination of GenAI and backup scenarios.

According to the strategic assumptions made by Gartner in the report, GenAI is mainly used to improve the management and operation of disaster recovery. It is predicted that the backup products integrated with GenAI will soar from 5% to 75% within 5 years.

That is to say, those who do backup software may need to invest in GenAI research now and integrate as soon as possible to gain an advantage in the future competition.

Foreign manufacturers have taken actions one after another. The report points out that capacsity is the first backup provider to provide a GenAI-based solution.

In the market overview, Gartner also pointed out that GenAI mainly helps backup management and troubleshooting to improve automation.

In fact, in the whole report, Gartner only mentioned how to use GenAI to simplify backup management and operation and maintenance, that is, how to use GenAI. However, brother watermelon believes that the GenAI scenario also poses some new challenges to the backup software itself, that is, the backup software should also consider how to optimize data protection in the GenAI scenario.

In GenAI scenarios, backup software faces some new requirements and challenges, including the following:

1. **increased data volume and complexity**: the data volume generated by GenAI is huge and diverse (such as text, images, and videos). Backup software needs to be able to process and manage these massive amounts of data and support efficient backup and recovery in various data formats.

2. **real-time and high efficiency**: as GenAI is more and more widely used, real-time data becomes particularly important. Backup software must provide real-time or near-real-time backup capabilities to ensure that data can be quickly protected after generation.

3. **intelligence and automation**: Backup software requires more intelligent functions, such as AI-based anomaly detection and fault prevention, automated policy adjustment, and intelligent recovery options. These features can help users cope with the changing GenAI environment.

4. **Compliance and security**: data generated by GenAI may contain sensitive information. Therefore, backup software must have powerful encryption and compliance management tools to ensure data security during backup and recovery.

5. Scalability and flexibility: due to the dynamic changes and rapid expansion of the GenAI environment, backup software needs to be highly scalable and can flexibly adjust backup policies and resource allocation according to business needs.

6. **Cross-platform support**:GenAI applications may run on multiple platforms, such as local data centers, cloud, and edge devices. Therefore, backup software must support cross-platform data backup and recovery, ensure Data consistency and availability in different environments. 7. **Data version management and tracing**: With the continuous evolution of GenAI, backup software needs to provide fine-grained data version management and tracing functions to support the recovery and rollback of models and data of different versions. These requirements reflect the new challenges posed by GenAI technology to backup software in terms of performance, intelligence, security and flexibility, and also bring new opportunities for the development of backup software.

This magic quadrant of backup has always been the pain of Chinese companies. Because for a long time, no Chinese company has been shortlisted for this report. Chinese companies have made breakthroughs in the Magic Quadrants of main storage, distributed files and objects, and HCI, but this backup Magic Quadrant has never been found by Chinese companies.

However, this year, we have seen hope that Huawei will be nominated by Gartner.

Gartner said that Huawei was not shortlisted mainly because it did not meet the global general availability schedule standards. That is, Huawei's backup products, the global GA time is too short.

According to the shortlisted criteria provided by Gartner, the product must be put into commercial use on April 1, 2021. In other words, Gartner evaluates the product situation in the past 3 years and cannot be a new product.

I don't know when Huawei's self-developed backup products will be available, but according to the comments of Gartner analysts, Huawei is likely to be shortlisted next year.

Rubrik went public this year. After the listing, the stock quickly reached a high point. After that, it kept fluctuating and declining. Now the stock price is average.

Analysts should be able to get more information after listing. As a subversion of the identity of traditional backup software, I don't know whether it can take on the important responsibility. Gartner also worried about Rubrik's pace of innovation in the report.

Although Rubrik's ranking in Gartner's report is higher than that of capacsity, in fact, I am more interested in capacsity. With the acquisition of NBU by capacsity, I feel that the future potential of capacsity is higher.

Brother watermelon feels that there are several changes in the Magic Quadrant of next year's backup:

whether the details are accurate or not, we will come back tomorrow summer.

All right, this sharing is over. Thank you.

The article is reprinted from: watermelon brother high-end storage knowledge public account