Conversations focus in on modernizing data protection

The Quantum event series Virtualization, Cloud and the New Realities for Data Protection has continued in full force over the past week and a half, with well-attended dinner meetings among senior-level IT professionals in Cleveland, Raleigh, Atlanta and, just last night, in Washington, DC. As has been the case with previous events in the series in Boston, New York, Chicago, Palo Alto and Houston, the discussions have been lively and engaging, focusing on some of the hot-button issues for IT professionals around data protection in environments that are increasingly virtualized and moving more towards cloud-computing deployments.

The events feature as keynote speaker Greg Shulz, founder and senior adviser at The Server and StorageIO Group (Storage IO). Shulz is an expert analyst with more than 30 years experience across applications, archiving, backup, business continuity, disaster recovery, performance and capacity planning, cloud computing and virtualization. Other speakers at the events include David Chapa, Chief Technology Evangelist at Quantum; Henrik Rosendahl, Vice President, Cloud Solutions, Quantum; Dan Duperron, Principal Technical Advisor, Quantum. This series will continue with dinner meetings in San Diego on August 22; Los Angeles, August 23; Uncasville, CT (Mohegan Sun Casino), August 29; St Louis, MO, September 10; Portland, OR, September11; and King of Prussia, PA, September 13.

After participating in discussions at four events in quick succession during the past week, Shulz said he is finding a lot of consistency in the concerns and questions of participants across geographies and even across industries. We asked him to summarize some of his observations from the meets in Cleveland, Raleigh, Atlanta and DC. Here is his response:

“I’m seeing continued strong interest in learning more about modernizing data protection. IT professionals want to move from swapping out media (e.g. tape, disk, cloud) like flat tires to finding and fixing issues and problems, along with removing complexity and cost vs. simple cost cutting or doing more with less.

“The cloud conversations continue around confidence in the services, including security, compliance, availability and cost – as well as how to use them, what to use them for, how to gain confidence and how to gain certainty. Some are using clouds, including hybrid, public or private, and some can only use private clouds today while others are exploring hybrid or public solutions. I’m seeing varying degrees of virtualization, which demonstrates that the market is far from reaching its full potential for virtual server deployment, both for consolidation as well as for the next wave of virtualization – including life beyond consolidation where virtualization is used for agility, flexibility and mobility as opposed to just for squeezing or reducing costs.

“Network bandwidth remains a concern for some individuals, particularly around issues such as moving or retrieving data to and from an off site or a cloud provider in a given amount of time. I’m seeing that some budgets are flat, some are increased, but all have more work to do, hence they are rethinking how, why, where and when data gets protected to remove costs, as opposed to cutting costs. I’m also seeing discussions around avoiding treating all applications and their data in the same manner as an effective means to reduce complexity and cost, as well as an alternative enabling organizations to do more with their resources, including people, budgets, available time, hardware, software, networks and services.”

Please let us know if you are facing the same backup and data protection challenges in your organization and what you are doing about it. Also, please stay tuned for our next update in the series next week as we move back to the West Coast.