 Live at VMworld 2011, this is the VMware Backup and Recovery Spotlight, and we've got a great panel today. We're going to riff on backup and recovery to my right is Brad Maltz. Brad is the CTO of Solutions Consulting Integrator, ICI of beautiful downtown Marlboro Mass, the home of Wikibon headquarters. To Brad's right is Drew Kramer, who's the VP of TechOps at VMware. Brad, thanks for coming on. Drew, thanks for coming on. Jerome Wendt, who's the president of DCIG, research consulting, blogging firm. Welcome. So guys, we're going to talk about backup, the state of backup, what's happening, your perspectives. Brad, I want to start with you because we have Drew here to refute everything I'm about to say. We always blame VMware for all of our problems. It's great stuff, but it causes all these crazy storage problems, but it has stressed traditional backup. Why is that? Can you talk a little bit about, from a CTO perspective, what's going on there? Well, before we say that, one thing I do want to state is backups have always been one of the hardest pieces of IT to actually deal with. And virtualization does take that to the next level simply because the consolidation ratios people are driving into right now really are just making it exceedingly hard to get the I.O. out of the back end of the boxes. And traditional backups in the physical world, we always really wanted to be able to get them as fast as possible and push those tape drives faster and faster. With virtualization, you can't really utilize the tape drives to the fullest because you're fighting with the CPU and memory and the back end storage of the virtualization technology. So what we found with the backup technology now in virtualization is the backup technologies had to modify how they actually work. That's where deduplications come in, disk-based backup solutions. They really are leading the industry in how backups are functioning in virtualization as we change the industry. So Drew, VMware has obviously made a lot of strides. When I first started coming to VMworld, it was obvious that there was a lot of work to be done in storage generally and backup specifically. What's your role at VMware and talk a little bit about backup at VMware, what you guys have been focused on and your priorities in the last several, I guess year and a half, two years and then going forward? Yeah, so I've been at VMware a little over eight years and I run a group called Technical Operations which is responsible for, I call it the care and feeding of the R&D organization at VMware, the folks that actually write the code that delivers the products out to all of you. And we certainly have our share of challenges around backup in that environment. As you can imagine, engineers like to generate a lot of data and they like to squirrel away that data, keep it forever, so to speak. One of the big helps and boons that's been good for us in the last few years is that deduplication technology we're just talking about. That's super important, especially when you've got a lot of VMs sharing essentially a common set of data across the operating system and also when you're with the data that I'm storing for engineers, generally a lot of duplicative data in there. So that dedupe technology certainly has helped out tremendously and that's something we leverage every day. Okay, so you guys leverage the dedupe and can you talk specifically about how you leverage dedupe? I mean you're talking about APIs that you've developed, other techniques that you're using, is it integrations? Yeah, so I mean the APIs are great because they allow the vendor-specific products like the ones from EMC or NetApp or anybody else for that matter to interact directly with the virtualization layers to optimize for those backup protocols. And so that is important and the hooks that are in there are the ones that we leverage for the stuff that we do. Remember, I'm an operational guy, you can ask me questions about the product, but I have to live it and breathe it every day. I'm actually working with VMware's products inside of VMware. Oh, so you're an IT practitioner? Exactly. Oh! What have you got? Bitflip. Okay, so all right, I'm with it. Sorry, we had a lot of hurricane delays, so we've got some great guests, but new guests to me. So, okay, I'm going to come back to you and talk a little bit about how you're doing that. Before I do that, Jerome, I want to talk to you a little bit about you're an independent analyst. You got a good view of the landscape. How do you see the backup and recovery landscape in VMware land generally, I guess, or specifically in virtualization generally? Well, really what I see kind of happening is just that there's just sort of this emergence. Well, I think Steve Manley touched on earlier where I really see backup being offloaded off of the server onto maybe the storage array and using more snapshot, more CDP type technology. I really see that being the trend towards where things are going. I mean, I think it's even evident by what VMware is doing with the change block tracking that we can't view the backup in the traditional way where you're doing once a day or once weekly full backups or incremental backups. They're just in the time or the processing power to accomplish all that. So that's definitely one trend. Another trend I'm seeing has to do with just sort of the emergence of the super user where it's no longer, it used to be like there was a backup guy who was there. That was his job to do backups. And I see that moving more and more towards becoming the VMware administrators and maybe just there would just be one group where there's maybe a backup specialist on that group but it's no longer just his whole job is just being a backup specialist. He's now part of the virtualization team where he's sort of a backup specialist. He knows more about it, but he's just part of the team. And then finally, I think I see more of a solution oriented approach where people just want to turn key of appliance. I mean, yes, they have VMware but they still have Windows, Linux, Unix and environments are getting much more complex and yet these guys have less time to really be specialists so they want a solution to come in that's sort of a hardware appliance that can solve all these different ways to do back and provide them multiple ways to do it and they just want to know we can turn this solution if we need to do a full backup and then de-duplicate it after it's done. Great. If we need to do CDP or do a snapshot, great. We can do that, but we know we can just turn to this one solution and it can provide us all these different options that we need. So those are really three big trends I'm seeing emerging. Excellent. So Drew, everything today is a service, right? That's correct. IT is a service, cloud services. Do you treat backup as a service inside of VMware? Inside of VMware right now we don't but that's actually something we have thought about and are pursuing. I mean, today it's done more traditionally. We do still have a backup administrator versus someone who's just operating at the virtual layer but the trend we see and the trend that we're training our people for internally is to really become that cloud administrator, the new role that's being defined inside the organization and that's where all the stuff that you just referred to definitely comes into play. You don't need to have to be a specialist in backup to get those backups up and running and more importantly to do the restores. I'm talking a lot about backup here but restores are actually the key. So backup is one thing. Recovery is everything. I've said it a million times, Brad. So what's happening in terms of recovery? We're seeing all kinds of new technologies coming into play. We're seeing all this VMware integration. You're seeing CDP. Where does some of these technologies fit and how are you architecting solutions that are more focused on recovery as opposed to backup? Well, it's funny because this discussion brings us into almost disaster recovery versus backup discussion where when people start talking recovery now you almost want your backup and recovery solution to be the final piece of being able to do a restore. You want to have multiple layers in front of that that you can actually do the restore from whether it's snapshots, whether it's a disaster recovery model with site recovery manager and replication between the sites but you want that backup module to really be the final frontier for your recovery. With that being said it all depends on what type of recovery you're looking at also. There's file-based recovery, there's image-based or VMDK level recovery and those two different types of recoveries are all dependent on the types of users you have in your environment. When you get into an IT practice of a larger organization such as VM or somebody of that size you don't want everybody to be able to restore their own VMDK files. That might be a little damaging because you never know what they're going to do but file-based recovery is something that you probably do want almost everybody to have that level of control. Absolutely, I would agree with that. It takes a lot of pressure off your help desk a lot of pressure off of the staff to do those single one-file recoveries. And it's really up to the backup solution. You have to have the right backup solution to facility and end-user being able to do their own restore. Traditional backup models do not always allow end-users to do their own restores because the backup software technology was really complex. One of the pieces that's really important here from an IT perspective, especially for recoveries is knowing that you have good backups. That's something that people never think about. Oh yeah, we're going to do our backups and we've done them for the past six months, two years but have you ever checked them? Do you know if the data in there is actually good? Another piece of this that's very important is actually monitoring your backups and testing your backups on a fairly regular basis. So that's a piece that a lot of backup administrators don't actually think about is are things working and how are we monitoring them or are we just using the standard backup software to monitor them? Is reporting fit in all this? Is reporting technology evolve to the point where we can actually answer those questions? Yeah, that's one of the things that I harp on with most of my customers. If we're trying to help them figure out how are they going to move to the next generation backup technology, the reporting and monitoring infrastructure can begin today. You don't have to wait for tomorrow for that because most of the solutions out there, one of my favorite ones is a DPA from EMC which stands for Data Protection Advisor. You can monitor all the different backup technologies out there to see how your backups are working today. And as you go to a different platform or stay on the same platform, that solution will give you almost like a health check in a dashboard to tell you how things are progressing and how you're doing with your solution. That was Alan Atkinson's company, wasn't it? Wisdom? Yes, that was Wisdom, exactly. He did very well with that. Boring old reporting. Who knew? Exactly, he's taken off. I would even take that one step further. Reporting is good and necessary, but you actually have to go off and have the discipline of doing the restores and making sure that the data has integrity and that you can do those restores. And we tend to do those on sort of a quarterly basis with a drill we do around disaster recovery for that. And so that really does kind of give you that final extra five minutes of sleep at night knowing that those backups actually did work. Alright, so we have to wrap but I'm going to get out on the line and ask you guys one brief question. So Jerome, let's see, look out, put on your crystal ball a little bit. What do you expect to see in the next 12 to 18, maybe even go even longer term if you want, 12, 24 months and back up in recovery. What I see, I just expect to see really faster recoveries. I think the tolerance for taking a long time to recover is decreasing. I think this whole, I see I walk around this conference, everyone's walking around with an iPad and doing their work and just the idea, there's just this expectation of instantaneous or fast recovery. So I think 30 minutes is going to become the new benchmark for recovery no matter what size the application maybe even faster. So I think that's rapidly coming down the pike. And Jerome my question for you is what is the one thing that the data protection industry could do to make your life better? I guess just making sure that the data is protected. Making sure that when I go to do that recovery it actually is there and without having to maybe have all the discipline around it today, just knowing that those reports are actually valid, that kind of thing. Brad, you're CTO, we love disruption. What do you see as the biggest potential disruptor in the whole backup and recovery space? Cloud. Honestly, cloud is the biggest disruptor because cloud is not just about technology. Cloud is about a modification of processes and policies. And unfortunately backup and recovery is so rigid in how it functions. It might not be as elastic as cloud is going to need it to be. So that's where you're going to see certain backup technologies that are going to have to modify themselves to really fit into the future cloud model. Very interesting. Gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. I wish we had more time. Great, great stuff. Thank you, and enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you.