VMware has been aggressively building and executing its hybrid cloud vision, extending the cloud outside of the data center. In line with this vision, VMware recently announced an expansion of its VMware vCloud Hybrid Service by adding disaster recovery as one of its offered services. This expansion will put VMware in direct competition with companies …
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Recently at Dell World, I was part of a conversation about what would be utopian disaster recovery and where we are today in the state of the industry. But where we are today is transforming, with a new name that encompasses many technologies. We are now using the term “data protection” (DP) to mean much …
Data protection of the future: What will it look like? Will we have huge amounts of storage in just one place, or will we have myriad data everywhere? The more copies the better, for example? Or are we moving toward a combination of the two? Can what we are doing today actually be used for data protection in the future? Think about how hybrid clouds are used today: do they grant us new forms of data protection?
Is the backup licensing model about to change? While I was at VMworld in San Francisco, I really took notice of all the different Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) options were available and believe this service has really reached it maturity. The amount of options and services available seems to have really taken a solid leap forward in the last few years. Most all the companies follow the same type of licensing model in that the software is licensed by the number of agents that are deployed in the environment, the number of hosts or the amount of data being backed up. Most all the companies except for one particular company I talked to.
The next generation of data protection is not just about backup or replication into and out of the cloud, but about inexpensive recovery directly into a cloud in a hypervisor agnostic manner. Recovery is the key to backup and while we spend many hours ensuring that our backups happen in a timely manner, we spend very little time testing those backups and ensuring that recovery can happen at any time for any workload, not just those that are mission critical. Next generation data protection must also be extremely simple to use, setup, and configure. Is your data protection tool a next generation tool or lost in the past somewhere?
In many cases, when we mention Data Protection for the Hybrid Cloud, we are usually talking about backing up to the cloud. The cloud becomes a repository of our backup images and in some cases those backup images can be launched within clouds that use the same technology. Being able to send data to the cloud is becoming table stakes for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) data protection. However, once we move outside the realm of IaaS to Platform or Software as a Service (PaaS or SaaS), data protection is hit or miss.
