Looking For Certainty In The Cloud

Quantum hosted its second informal data protection dinner meeting among IT professionals on Monday night in Chicago and the discussion was quite animated – particularly when it came to cloud computing and what to do about storage and backup in the cloud. The event was titled Virtualization, Cloud and the New Realities for Data Protection and it certainly lived up to its theme.

Keynote speaker and storage expert Greg Schulz, founder and senior advisor at The Server and StorageIO Group (StorageIO), said one of the important issues among the more than 20 participants was “trust,” particularly when it came to trusting protection of their mission critical data in the cloud.

“In the cloud, people were saying they don’t want to just blindly trust their data to anybody,” Schulz said. “They want to have trust in their provider, their services, their tools, their capabilities. Protecting data in the cloud is a shared responsibility. Service providers have a role, but users have a complementary role in how they use the service provider, configuring their systems, running pilot programs and utilizing best practices. All of the major themes resonated – disaster recovery, backup, archiving – and there was a lot of cloud confusion.”

Schulz said one of the participants described a widely know situation where Amazon’s cloud service went down. One customer, in particular, did not go down with Amazon because it was using the Amazon service more strategically – as an adjunct to its overall storage infrastructure as part of an effort to increase availability. And it worked.

“A lot of companies are just going to the cloud because it may be cheaper than doing it themselves,” Schulz said. “If that’s the primary reason for going to the cloud, you’re probably missing bigger opportunities. If you use the cloud as a complement, you can increase availability. The key is to determine how you will use the resources available to you – including the cloud – to improve upon what you are currently doing.”

As Schulz noted, the discussion set up perfectly for the presenters from Quantum because their flexible and innovative approach to the cloud gives their customers all kinds of options for data protection. “Quantum’s story plays very well with the ‘trust’ factor because they can do it all – physical, virtual and also in the cloud,” Schulz said. In fact, the theme of the presentation by Quantum Chief Technology Evangelist David Chapa was “Quantum Certainty.”

Chapa’s presentation focused on Quantum solutions for big data, data protection and the cloud, with virtualization as a recurring theme because it is central to all of these trends. In fact, one of the key points of Chapa’s presentation was that all of these trends are converging quickly and customers are finding that they have to combine products and services together to solve their data management challenges.

In an era where trust is an issue, Quantum presented two case studies where customers have been able to achieve certainty in both a virtualized environment and in a cloud environment.

How were they able to achieve certainty? Tune in next time when we post our third post in this series following the next informal dinner meeting, which will take place on Thursday evening in Palo Alto at MacArthur Park Restaurant. There’s still time to sign up at Virtualization, Cloud and the New Realities for Data Protection.