Four emerging data protection markets are expected to see "explosive growth" in the next three years, according to a new report from the Taneja Group.

Analysts from the research firm say four specific markets -- Continuous Data Technologies, Wide Area Data Services, Virtual Tape Libraries and Capacity Optimized Storage -- will take off before the end of 2010. Those four segments will grow at a 45% compound annual growth rate by the end of this decade. That will make the four, together, a $3.55 billion market.

The data protection market is experiencing a technological sea change, Taneja analysts say in a written release. "The current leadership positions of backup and restore incumbents are being challenged by a new crop of small startups." Over the next five years, capacity optimized storage, continuous data technologies, and wide area data services technologies will serve as the primary mechanisms for solving the increasing challenges of backup and recovery faced by most storage administrators, analysts say.

Continuous data technologies, as defined by Taneja, is a way to handle virtually any act of 'copy creation' in the enterprise. These technologies will conduct granular captures of production data and then allow administrators to create unlimited numbers of any point-in-time images via a disk-based platform. Wide area data services is generally thought of as a superset of several smaller market segments, such as WAN optimization, and application acceleration. It's focused on solving application latency and bandwidth problems on distributed networks.

Capacity optimized storage is a way to get more in a storage medium by scanning for repetitive patterns and shortening them into symbols. It's touted as offering greater compression than conventional means. And virtual tape library technology is disk storage virtualization. It's designed to improve backup and recovery times and is aimed at archival storage.

Taneja predicts: