 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. I'm here with my co-host, David Floyer. This is the virtualization backup spotlight. It's a sponsored segment by EMC's backup and recovery group, BRS. And David and I are going to set the tone before we get in for the next hour, we're going to be digging in to backup, backup as a service. How virtualization generally in VMware specifically have changed backup, what the imperative is for IT, shops, IT environments, CIOs, action items for CTOs and the like. David, thanks very much for joining me. You're very welcome. Thanks for having me here. Okay, so we're going to go through sort of a set of slides that we set up. We're going to go back and forth and generally have a discussion and just to frame things in the first slide we're going to talk about how virtualization sort of changed the model forever. You were in the keynotes this morning and backup didn't get a lot of lip service, did it? We didn't hear anything about backup, a little bit on HA and maybe disaster recovery. But not much on really, like you said, nothing on backup specifically, but virtualization changed everything. So much. Including backup, we always talk about stores, Pat talked about the IO blender effect, but he didn't talk about how it stresses backup. So I wonder if you could review for the audience how virtualization really changed backup. Yeah, it changed it because instead of having just one machine to back up, you had 10, 15, 20 machines to back up. So you needed- And they were virtual. And they were virtual, they were still machines. So the original mechanism was to actually go through each virtual machine and back it up as if it was a real machine. And that wasn't very effective. So VMware came out with some technology, particularly the change track technology. CBT, change block tracking. Change block tracking, which allowed only the changes to be backed up across the whole of the machines. Yeah, because otherwise you'd just be throwing all kinds of data and IOs at the back end. I mean, you've got 20 times the physical data that you would have had to have backed up. And that becomes a choke point. Essentially the message here is that the old paradigm doesn't work in the newer, like sometimes call it paving the cow path. And that's what a lot of people were doing. And then with the data growth, forget it, you couldn't do that. So that's fine, but in my mind, David, a lot of that is sort of band-aids. What's really required, do we talk about cloud as a big theme at this event? And hybrid cloud and so forth. What's really required is, and we've talked about this, we've been talking about this for a while now. So we really want to test where we're at, but back up as a service, data protection as a service. So talk about that a little bit, talk about what that means to you. Well, let's start with VM. Because the crucial thing in VM is to be able to manage the application itself, to have all of the data about the application available to the systems providers. So you need to know about the storage, you need to know about the servers, you need to know about the network and manage that as a whole. That's the starting point. And then once you've got that application running in that VM or running in a folder, a set of applications in a folder of VM, then what you want to be able to do is provide them with the SLAs, the all of the SLAs that enable it to run. And one of those key enablers is what level of backup do you require? What level of RTO and RPO recover point objective and recover time? What's the business impact really? It's the business impact, yes. And you want to be able to, in the same ways you want to be able to vary the performance by VM and a lot of the announcements around that today were about being able to do that. You need to be able to vary the backup by VM as well so that you can really fine tune and allocate the resources exactly where they need it for the benefit of the business. Yeah, we've talked about this a lot. There's a lot of organizations look at backup as a one size fits all. They've got a single service level, independent of the SLA, independent of the RPO and the RTO, independent of the value of the applications. Look, here's backup, it's a bolt on. We've got to have backup, so here it is. Here's your service level, just use it. And so what that leads to is a situation where either your applications are over backed up, if you will, over protected. You don't need that much protection for certain applications. You don't necessarily need to replicate everything and SRDF it to use an example. Or that's not so much of a problem other than you spend it too much money. The bigger issue is you don't have enough protection for critical applications. For critical applications. And protection both for software failure, for microcode failure, as well as physical failure. So we've sort of talked about this next slide, which is the technical angle, going from physical to virtual. How about this data growth problem? I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. You know, I always use the phrase, how do you backup two petabytes? You don't. How should organizations think about dealing with data growth? That is, I think, one of the fundamental big questions that has to be addressed over the next few years. Because as you say, the data is growing, enormous amounts of data. And there are some characteristics about data which make that growth difficult from a backup perspective. One of which is you want to get that data off the site as part of that protection. You need it somewhere else. And if you've got it somewhere else, then it would be useful to take advantage of having it somewhere else as well. Being able to take advantage of that data in another site. So the strategies have to take into account two major things. First of all, data likes to be close to data. And secondly, that you need to get that data protected as quickly as possible. The quicker you can get it off site, the quicker you can get it to another location. The more protection that you have, the quicker the recovery is. So those two fundamental, almost opposite trends that are taking us there. So if we can provide solutions to that, and if there can be, for example, large-scale mega-centers which can provide a combination of private cloud and public cloud, provide your own data there and next to data from the public cloud, if we can provide that sort of architecture in off-site, then that could be a very strong way of providing added value to the organization from that backup data. So, David, I want to go to the next action items for IT organizations. I want to go through this fairly quickly because we don't have much time here. But the first one is that backup as a service, this is really sort of CIO action, backup as a service should be a fundamental part of transformation strategies. I actually have to say I was disappointed not to hear more from VMware this morning about backup. It's a critical piece of the stack of the ecosystem and one that should be fundamental, should not be thought of as a bolt-on. There was a little bit to be fair to them in the Vsans and in their ability to have alternative models for backing things up. So maybe that's an evolution of the thinking that is just sort of there and not necessarily explicit but there's a lot of processes in place today that needs attention. What do you make of this hybrid cloud? Where does backup fit into the hybrid cloud? Well, to me the place of hybrid cloud is we have a remote copy of that backup. So let's take advantage of that. Let's put that data, get that data and make some use of it and bring it close to other data in that cloud. So if we can use that hybrid cloud to create it remotely and tie it together with the public cloud and by tying it together have it very close together so that you can backhaul it rather than anything else. I think long-term that's going to be the strategy to be able to apply policies in a similar way not necessarily the same policy but apply policies in a similar way and have the same catalog of policies applied of public versus private. You have the data there as a way of cutting back over to it so it's real data but you can use that data in line with other data in the cloud to enhance the value of both sets of data. Now let's talk about technology integration. Let's talk to the CTOs here. We always say from a strategy standpoint think about your entire application portfolio but you will see specific implementations by use case. You'll see VMware backup. You will see we're going to be at Oracle OpenWorld in a couple of weeks. You'll hear a lot about RMAN. So there is a place for bespoke tailored implementations but from a strategy standpoint you need to be thinking about backup across the application portfolio. Absolutely, I agree with that. Okay, and then the other one is organizational. What about the roles of the backup admin, the DBA and application owners? How should those change and how are they changing? Well, if you can get to the application being the focal point and the set of services behind the application provided in a much simpler way you'll be able to get over to a much more of a DevOps type of organization by application so that you can use that service, use those experts for an application and provide the storage, the network, the backup skills, all of those integrated in a few people for that particular application. All right, and then we're out of time but the last two we have, so from a vendor management standpoint we got to find a company who is going to actually be able to deliver on their backup as a service, their data protection as a service vision. I want to talk to EMC about that in the upcoming segment. It was here at VMworld in 2010 that Jim McNeil who was at the time CEO of Falcon Store put forth the vision of data protection as a service and the Apple time machine but the company really didn't have the resources to execute on that vision. So that's one, and then from an asset management standpoint you're going to have to rethink some of the processes around that you've hardened around backup. So David, thanks for coming on. You're going to be back a little later to interview some of the practitioners with me so we've got the technologists from EMC coming up, we're going to ask them about their vision and we've got a couple of customers coming on so keep it right there. This is theCUBE, we're live from VMworld 2013. We'll be right back.