 This is Dave Vellante. We're live from VMworld 2012 and I'm here with Stu Miniman who's also with Wikibon. This is Silicon Angles coverage of VMworld 2012. We're here in Moscone and this is day two for us and we would like to welcome you to the VMware backup spotlight. These spotlights are sponsored segments where we go deep into a topic and this topic here is data protection, backup and recovery. It's a really hot area, it's one that is problematic for VMware customers and practitioners. And Stu, we're going to dig into this and talk about the trends in backup and recovery. You and I are going to set it up. We've got some experts, some domain experts coming on that we're going to talk to. We've got some customers coming on and we've got an ESG analyst, Jason Buffington will be on to wrap it up. So what we've done is what we do in these spotlight segments is we prepare some of the overview trends, some of the things that we're seeing in the Wikibon community. And Mark Hopkins has the content and we'll put it up on the screen as we go along. We'll talk to you. We'd like to start with the market angle. Stu, you and I have been following these markets for a number of years. We've seen backup really evolve, haven't we? Yeah, absolutely Dave. So if we look at kind of the virtualization market there are so many pain points that users had. There were things that worked really well in a physical environment that when we went virtual didn't work quite as well. Backup was one of those. And the same VMware is trying to make sure they can kind of keep up with the competition, adding features into virtualization, especially what comes base with the hypervisor because the hypervisor is being commoditized. And there were some announcements this week that we'll talk about that really are designed to address that problem. But as we've talked about many times, virtualization breaks storage and it really puts a lot of pressure on backup windows. Now the other big thing we see here is tape is not dead. Everybody loves to say tape is dead. Tape is not dead. It's the last resort. It's the deep archive. But it is absolutely not the main backup media anymore. And we talked to a number of customers. Many, many still have tape, but very few are using tape as the primary backup. Yeah, absolutely Dave. We look at things like virtual tape libraries chipped away at tape, flash and disk or just pushing tape further downstream. The revenue stream of tape has gone down. But like everything else we know in IT that everything is additive and customers have multiple environments and tape's going to stay around for a while. So we saw some statistics this week. Pat Gelsinger and Paul Moritz and virtually, every other speaker has talked about the propensity or the magnitude of virtualization. About 60% of applications running on x86 servers are virtualized now. So what that leads to is virtual machine sprawl. You've got massive data growth. Everybody's talking about big data. What does that do? That stresses the backup window. So what we've seen is the evolution of backup. Now Stu, you may remember VCB, VMware Consolidated Backup. It was VMware's initial attempt to really provide a backup mechanism and it really was not well received by customers. Very cumbersome. So the VMware really, around the 2009, 2010 timeframe really got serious about storage APIs. Not only with primary storage like with the VAAI, but also VADP, the VMware API for data protection. And as part of that, they included something called change block tracking. Now that's a common denominator in the industry. You see it in Oracle environments. The change block tracking really is critical because of course you're moving so much data around the network in a virtualized world. You only want to move or backup those changes that have been made. You don't want to backup the entire volume every night. Now that's very important in a virtualized environment where you've got this IO blender. Yeah, absolutely Dave. Right here about kind of on-site and off-site. Cloud fits into this. There's been so many different solutions that are trying to kind of replace tape and find other ways to do backup. And if I'm getting to, we said over 90% virtualized, we've got to solve it for that base hypervisor environment so that I have that flexibility. That includes backup which is critical for any customer environment. Yeah man, I think that these are some of the impediments. I mean, we've heard this week that the industry, VMware in particular, has done a good job of encapsulating and abstracting and pooling and automating servers and memory. Storage is getting better. Networking, your field is really becoming the new bottleneck as Flash takes over. But these impediments like storage, like backup in particular, will slow the pace of virtualization adoption unless they're addressed. And so that's what VMware is trying to do. The other pieces of VMware data recovery, VDR, is a software appliance that's shipped with vSphere 5. It's a free utility. That's been replaced by VDP, VMware Data Protection. Now, VDP is powered by Avamar. Avamar uses a source side de-duplication capability which has always played well in virtualized environments. Why? Because you're de-duping at the source before you're pushing data over the network. So that's been critical. That's a new announcement that was made just this week, right? Yeah, and it was something that we talked about at the keynote this morning. There actually was a demo done up on stage and really simple and really designed for the virtualization admin to be able to do that. A couple of clicks, a lot of automation. Simple, simple, simple, and oh yeah, it's free and included. So as I said before, all those things that we want to make sure that kind of the Essentials Plus bonus bundle is better for customers, especially as VMware wants to get deeper into the SMB market, which was a big push not only for what they're doing here at VMworld, but what we're hearing from VMworld as VMware for their push out into the marketplace to expand because they do real well in the enterprise and many of the mid-tier markets, but those places that might be more prone to go Microsoft because it's free or some of the free hypervisors, Microsoft wants to push down into that broader part of the market to keep their growth accelerating. Now, we're also seeing new forms of backup emerge really around this notion of snapshots, space efficient snapshots that can enable data protection. So we have a visual here. Mark, if you wouldn't mind putting up the next slide. This is essentially what we've called on theCUBE the time machine for the enterprise. We first introduced this concept at VMworld 2010, and now we're starting to see the technology community step up and actually provide these types of capabilities. And essentially the idea, Stu, is you take an efficient snap of the data, and you might even use continuous data protection. So a CDP, and you can dial up or dial down your RPO, i.e. your recovery point objective, how much data you're willing to lose. Well, I want it only to be a minute, or I want it to be 15 minutes. Obviously losing only a minute or a second is more expensive than losing an hour. So you can dial it up or dial it down, and basically you take that snap and then you go shoot it through the LAN, either onsite, let's say you do it first onsite, and then you get it offsite. You might even put it into an optional tape archive and then jam it through the WAN for long-term backup or archiving or even the DR target. So now we've involved the network and snapshots to really take advantage of protecting data and combining in, blending in disaster recovery. Yeah, Dave, if you look at the analogy, the time machine for the enterprise, we think about Apple and what they did with time machine on kind of the Apple. It's nice and simple and easy. Since 2010, Apple's launched iCloud, and iCloud isn't working all that well. So maybe VMware can actually get this to the enterprise before Apple gets it working right for the consumer. Yeah, right, that's right. I mean, oftentimes we've seen consumer lead, just good enough consumer lead the trends. That's the consumerization of IT. And I think you're right. I think there's real opportunities for the enterprise to give a little bit more reliable grade. Now we're going to end on some customer imperatives. We've got eight. So the key, and we've talked about this a lot in theCUBE, is to reduce your resource contention in virtual environments. Still, we understand the importance of that. It's critical in order to maintain and reduce your backup windows or even eliminate your backup windows. As I say often, my friend Fred Moore coined this term, backup is one thing, recovery is everything. So think about things like recovery times and recovery granularity and the data quality and really push your vendors hard on those issues. Now Stu, the other piece is VMware integration. We've done a lot of work and you've spearheaded much of this with David Foyer on the levels of VMware integration from backup vendors. We talked about VAI, but specifically here we're talking about VADP, vCenter integration. We mentioned VDP replaces VDR as the small business solution. It's a free solution. But so integration is very, very important for customers. Yeah, absolutely. And you talked about the technology that powers this was Avamar's technology. And I remember back when Avamar first kind of came out with that virtualization integration. It wasn't take something old and kind of patch it. It's really designed for that virtual environment. So it's kind of a natural fit for virtual environments and lots and lots of virtualization customers knew that on the enterprise side and now they've got kind of a free and even easier version to use that comes with vSphere 5.1. Yeah, thanks Stu. We hear a lot about homogeneity but I think that the reality is you got a plan on living in a multi-hypervisor world. It's not likely you're going to have one system from one vendor. So, you know, while at the same time you're going to have oftentimes many backup solutions might have two, we might even have three. That's the norm. But multiple management consoles don't have to be. From your networking background you know about the single pane of glass and what that means for customers. But I think we really want to push customers to take a similar approach for backup. Yeah, Dave actually just to give a data point on the multi-hypervisor environment we used to study that Wikibon published last week. According to our respondents I think it was 56% of customers today are using more than one hypervisor. Many of them have three or four hypervisors today actually for different environments. Some worry about silos popping up even in your hypervisors but you get a great point on the management piece that you need to simplify operations or you can't keep up. Now as we talked about, snapshots are rapidly emerging as a new form of data protection. And specifically we talked about this notion of a time machine for the enterprise. But really as a means of protecting data it's becoming the new vision and we expect to see a number of companies really hopping on that. We're seeing it today in the marketplace and we expect that that is going to ultimately be the norm where backup is provided as a service. And then the other piece is as part of that don't make disaster recovery and afterthought all too often. Particularly in small and mid-sized businesses companies don't have a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy integrate that into your data protection strategies and then finally backup is not one size fits all. Really think about the value, the value of the data and the value of the applications that you're protecting and tailor your backup for that. So Stu, that's really a high level overview of what we're seeing in the backup market and some of the trends. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your thoughts with our audience and so that wraps up the front segment. Stay tuned. We've got deep dyes with domain experts. We've got customer perspectives and we've got the independent analyst perspective. Keep it right there. Siliconangle.tv's coverage of VMworld and this is the VMware backup spotlight. Keep it right there.