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Throw light on the market scenario of Data Protection-as-a-Service?
Data Protection as-a-service has witnessed an uptake in the mid-market segment from a public cloud standpoint, while large enterprises have been using this phenomenon as a private cloud.
One of the factors that fuelled the adoption of DPaaS is the increasing deployment of virtualisation solutions in the data centre.
Virtualisation, in particular, paved the way for the evolution of IT as a Service, which later resulted in data protection-as-a-service as a sequence. So, there is very high adoption, very high demand and a very strong movement towards leveraging data protection-as-a-service in an appropriate manner with certain enhancements.
Can you list out certain challenges that IT managers would face with regard to data protection-as-a-service?
In my 30 years of experience, I have observed a visible transformation in every 5-7 years in the industry. In early 90s, the data protection was done primarily on tape. Then, there were VTRs which used the disk form factor but still behaved like a tape; but there was good return on investment because of the advantages that disk provided in terms of ease of use.
One of the factors that fuelled the adoption of DPaaS is the increasing deployment of virtualisation solutions in the data centre
The challenge, earlier, was to protect the entire infrastructure. The back-up software became a bit of a bottleneck and is no longer able to keep up with the scale and size of the deployments. The current challenge for them is to protect a huge list of data sources, including databases, file systems, ERP applications, virtual infrastructure, and applications sitting on the cloud. The areas of protection that IT managers need to handle have expanded significantly.
The second biggest challenge is explosion in information. There is so much of workload and data to protect, and the mobility factor has added to the challenge because of the volume of data that is transmitted. One of the solutions that IT managers think of is around software defined data centres which are primarily based on virtual infrastructure.
Speed, agility and reduced cost from any investment they make on IT is another challenge, with data also increasing in parallel.
The current challenge for IT managers is to protect a huge list of data sources, including databases, file systems, ERP applications, virtual infrastructure, and applications sitting on the cloud
What kind of steps do you recommend for them to address these challenges?
Business continuity is critical and business downtime implies loss of revenue. Data protection continuum is one of our key focuses, where different workloads require different types of data protection methodologies. On one extreme, there has to be zero downtime–always available workloads.
Continuous replication is another way, where one can periodically move data to another location and keep versioning. After replication comes snapshot. With snapshots, one can instantaneously take an image of servers or virtual machines or storage at periodic intervals for business to assess. Back-up and archiving is another way for long term retention.
What are the new capabilities in the suite?
Snapshot Management is one important aspect of the newer offerings which can improve protection for NAS-based data significantly. This suite also provides deep support for VMware and Microsoft cloud infrastructures via unique integration with VMware vCloud Suite and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Enhanced security features and new Linux support for Mozy public clouds enable greater adoption by enterprise customers.
The new Data Domain Operating System extends its support far beyond just backup to establish it as a cornerstone for enabling delivery of data protection as-a-service.
There are new releases in VPLEX and RecoverPoint software to address the full continuum of data protection needs, offering continuous availability, mobility and disaster recovery for more environments and multi-site configurations.
Data Protection-As-A-Service is a new member in the As-A-Service family.
How are the customers reacting to this new service phenomenon?
We have a two-pronged strategy. One is to provide the best solution to protect the EMC infrastructure, but we are absolutely gaining a lot of new customers that are not on EMC storage. So, our data protection strategy now is to support all platforms. For example, VPLEX RecoverPoint solutions are platform agnostic. Data Protection Software solutions like Networker, Avamar support EMC hardware as well as non-EMC hardware.
What kind of cost implications do you see with Data Protection-as-a-service?We are advisors to CIOs and ITDMs worldwide and my observations from the interactions with many of them reveal that there is a huge cost involved in the area of data protection. The traditional methods are not sufficient to do faster backup.
For example, when a CIO of a bank is responsible for data protection inIndia, the data volume in the last 3 years has gone up to 1 PB from 100 terabytes. The back-up used to take six hours. Now, with increased volume, it can take up to 29 hours. Moreover, the warehouses are filled with tapes. Data retrieval and recovery is also a huge and complex task with petabytes of data stored.
As part of the new architecture of IT-as-a-Service, the storage costs are significantly lowered from 10 xs to 1x. From the data protection window perspective, the time taken to back up goes down from 29 hours to 2 hours. Reduced downtime is another factor that can give relief to ITDMs.
So, there is a cost in the new purchase; but no one can deny the fact that the return of investment and the operational efficiency, speed, agility and long-term benefits are such that no IT Manager or a CIO wants to be deprived of.
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