Veritas (oops, I mean Symantec) wakes up to remote office situation

Symantec's recent introduction of its NetBackup PureDisk remote backup software is a very good barometer of growing market and end-user awareness of the dire need for more - and better - data protection options for remote data.

Risking sounding like a broken record: There is a crisis looming in remote offices and branch offices (ROBOs). There is simply too much data that is not being adequately protected -- and you, Mr./Mrs. End-User, know what I'm talking about. It's one of the 21st century's dirty little secrets. You've probably heard me cite this stat before, but it bears repeating: As much as 30% or more of an organization's mission-critical data resides outside the data center in ROBOs. That means as much as 30% or more of your data isn't being adequately protected - and, importantly, leveraged for business value.

While Symantec PureDisk (which, incidentally, is really just Data Center Technologies' product re-packaged and re-labeled under the Symantec name) isn't the "perfect" solution to the ROBO problem, it is a good first step. And while other smaller vendors are arguably several significant steps ahead of Symantec, Symantec is the first of the leading backup providers to introduce products that specifically target the ROBO. IBM fell short last month when it introduced TSM Express without a ROBO component that pushes data back to the data center, and the rest of the gang (Computer Associates, CommVault, EMC, etc.) have been pretty quiet about the subject.

Nonetheless ROBO data protection will be a big topic this year. It'll be as big -- if not not bigger -- than SMB was last year!

SNW Spring: No more same old, same old

I took some time over the weekend to reflect on (and, yes, recover from) last week’s Storage Networking World (SNW) show in San Diego.

While I didn’t get the opportunity to see the sites of San Diego first-hand, I did get to hear directly from vendors and end-users about their storage initiatives and practices, respectively. Unlike prior SNWs, discussions centered on solving or addressing business/IT problems, not hyping any single technology or industry catchword. How refreshing!

From a data protection standpoint (which is my vantage point these days), I heard and talked a lot about recovery and utilization: How can end-users improve recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs/RPOs) to meet business SLAs? Which technologies should end-users deploy and vendors develop (e.g., CDP, snapshot, replication, etc.)? In fact, except in the context of remote offices/branch offices (ROBOs), the word “backup” was rarely uttered by vendors or end-users alike. This compares to the event a year ago, when “backup windows” and “ILM” were the buzz.

New technologies, like CDP and de-duplication, have opened new doors, allowing end-users to get beyond backup and begin to focus on larger business issues. Doing so hinges on the ability of end-users to leverage primary and, yes, secondary data pools – and, importantly, their ability to move data quickly and efficiently to/from/among these pools as required.

While there is still a lot of work to be done (searching and data classification, for example), the industry is clearly on the right track. It’ll be interesting to see if they stay the course.