Tonight is the fourth in Quantum’s series of dinner roundtable discussions on Virtualization, Cloud and the New Realities for Data Protection and, if it’s anything like the first three gatherings, it promises to be a compelling and freewheeling affair. Tonight’s dinner takes place in Houston, following similar events in Boston, Chicago and Palo Alto. The series concludes on Thursday with a dinner meeting in New York.

Last Thursday’s meeting in Palo Alto had a strong turnout, with around 25 attendees from a wide range of organizations – large and small environments, private and public sector, with a lot of interaction and discussion. One of the interesting topics was virtualization beyond consolidation – where the focus expands from consolidation to agility. As virtualization becomes more widely accepted and becomes more of a platform for cloud-based initiatives, the issues move from ratios of physical to virtual machines, to strategic discussions around how VMs can enable portability, flexibility, backup, disaster recovery and high availability.

As in the earlier gatherings, when the topic turned to backup in and cloud computing, trust was a key issue. “People wanted to talk about trust and confidence in clouds, including the reality that cloud data protection is a shared responsibility and that only you can prevent cloud data loss based on the services that you choose,” said storage expert Greg Shulz, who is the keynote presenter for all of these events and is the founder and senior advisor at The Server and StorageIO Group (StorageIO).

Also participating in the discussions are thought leaders from Quantum, including David Chapa, Chief Technology Evangelist. Because the trust issue keeps coming up in discussions about the cloud, it is fitting that the theme for Chapa’s presentation focuses on “Certainty in a Cloud Environment.” The presentation points to two specific use cases where Quantum has been able to work with customers to improve performance, productivity and trust in both virtualized and cloud environments. These are:

• Bend Memorial Clinic, in Bend, Oregon. BMC’s challenge was the volume of data growth was outgrowing the ability of the IT staff to manage it. It turned to a virtualized environment, but sought a cost-effective solution that would protect both physical and virtual environments. It chose a Quantum N-tier solution consisting of DXi deduplication, Scalar library, vmPRO software and Vision management. The results: Backups that are six times faster, IT productivity has quadrupled, and the time required to do restores has been reduced from days to minutes.
• Xerox was looking for virtual backup and recovery technology to enable its cloud backup and disaster recovery services. It chose Quantum DXi V1000 virtual deduplication appliances and vmPRO data protection to enable Xerox cloud services. The result: With enterprise-class backup and disaster recovery, Xerox has been able to capitalize on a massive new market opportunity enabled by the cloud.

How can some of these technology solutions enable you to deal with the new realities in data protection engendered by virtualization and the cloud? Tune in next time when we review the discussion of tonight’s event in Houston in our ongoing series on Virtualization, Cloud and the New Realities for Data Protection.

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.

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Data protection has never been more important, or more challenging. Organizations are generating and storing more data than ever and the volume just keeps getting bigger and bigger. With the broader acceptance of virtualization and cloud computing, the challenges are only getting more intense.

So what do you do about backup in this environment and how do you incorporate technologies that will help you to “future proof” your IT infrastructures? Those were among the questions addressed this week at an informal dinner gathering of about 20 IT professionals in Boston. The event was sponsored by Quantum and featured the storage expert Greg Schulz as a keynote speaker.

Schulz, founder and senior advisor at The Server and StorageIO Group (StorageIO), told the gathering that it’s time to start thinking in terms of modernizing your data protection schemes. In order to rethink your strategy, you have to set the proper stage and really understand your data: How much are you generating, when are you generating it, how long are you keeping it, how much of it is in physical machines, how much is virtual, how does the cloud fit into your overall strategy.

“When it comes to data protection, you want to make sure you are shifting your focus to the source of the problem,” Schulz said. “If you’re driving a car and you keep getting flat tires, instead of constantly changing the tires, you want to get to the root of the problem and find out why and how it’s happening.”

The idea, Schulz said, is to “move upstream” to find the source of the problem and then “come downstream” to apply the right technology solutions, whether they are deduplication, compression, tiering, archiving. There are a wide range of potential solutions, several of which were described in presentations from Quantum executives. Quantum also discussed some interesting use cases involving key customers.

What are some of those solutions and use cases? And how do you plan for the journey to modernizing your backup? Tune in next week when we will post our second update following the next informal dinner meeting in Chicago, which will take place on Monday evening. Other upcoming events in the series are scheduled for Palo Alto, Houston and New York. For details go to Virtualization, Cloud and the New Realities For Data Protection.

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