Because of that, data protection gets attention (and major funding) when there is a significant problem. There is an increasing problem in getting the protection done in the allotted time, meeting the recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). With capacity demand growing, the current methods of protecting data are being examined to improve the approaches.

At the Dell Storage Forum in Boston last week, there was more talk that IT has made a transition to include the use of snapshot and replication in the data protection process. Snapshots, or point-in-time copies that are synchronized with applications for a coherent snapshot copy, have become the primary means for making a copy that can meet the RTO for many of the primary cases where restores are required. About 90% of restores occur within 30 days of when that data was created or updated. The snapshots are typically done using features in the storage system, but may also use special host software.

Replication is typically a remote copy that is used for disaster protection and leveraged also for restores of data that may have been damaged (corrupted or deleted) locally. The mechanics of the recovery varies significantly between the different vendor solutions.

Backup is still used and still a valuable tool in the data protection arsenal. It is now just a part of the overall picture which includes snapshots and replication. Extensions to backup software are capitalizing on these transitions by IT and include such capabilities as invoking the storage system-based snapshots, managing the catalog of snapshot copies, and managing the remote copies of data.

Exploitation of storage system or hypervisor-based features such as Changed Block Tracking are another means to improve the data protection by reducing the amount of time required and the amount data. This is another developing area and will be a differentiator between different backup software solutions and the storage system hardware that has those capabilities.

Backup software will effectively need to be renamed to something that reflects that what it does goes beyond traditional backup.

The transitions occurring in data protection are being driven by IT to meet requirements to protect data while also meeting operational considerations. Software and hardware solutions can enable the transitions and make the operations more seamless. This will continue to be a developing area – both for vendor products and the adoption by IT.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

We know that because CommVault CEO Bob Hammer sounded more like a product marketing manager than a CEO discussing his company’s earnings earlier this week.

Hammer gave a quick rundown of CommVault’s earnings – in line with the disappointing preliminary results it gave last month. After assuring financial analysts that things are looking up this quarter, he spent most of the call talking about Simpana 9.

Highlights of that product, which will include source- and target-side data deduplication:

“We’ll enable the customer to dedupe at the source, target, or in between, at a very high scale and with the deduplication volume being fully indexed,” Hammer said. “All those are unique. Nobody has fully indexed dedupe, nobody can dedupe at the source or target, or manage dedupe in the stack across different storage silos.”

When I spoke to Hammer after the call, he expanded on the “dedupe everywhere” concept.

“It’s not just dedupe. Dedupe is a feature but it has to be managed across the stack and it has to be application specific,” he said. “What we’re seeing is to manage your data and data movement, you have to automate the virtualization layer granularly with application-specific information to manage virtual nodes that are moving dynamically. You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of these nodes. And you have to manage them to a storage space across all hardware silos. You don’t just move them with snapshots and replication. They have to be indexed and granular, and you have to be able to move them down the storage stack, across silos and into the cloud.”

Despite his enthusiasm about the new release, Hammer remained disappointed in sales from last quarter. CommVault’s revenue was $66.3, as it forecasted in July. That was more than $5 million below Wall Street expectations. Hammer did say many deals that failed to close by the end of the quarter have since closed. The quarter was the first of CommVault’s fiscal year, and Hammer said he hasn’t lower expectations for the full year.

“We had a big hole [last quarter],” he said. “Now our objective is to catch up.”

Druva last week released its inSync 4.0 backup software, which the vendor claims has application-aware data deduplication designed to work at the logical block or object level. Druva founder and CEO Jaspreet Singh compares it to EMC Avamar, but built specifically for laptops (EMC added laptop support for Avamar last year).

“We’re application aware, so we understand the file format,” Singh said. “We can actually go through APIs from Microsoft to understand the PST format, and dedupe at the message level or attachment level. We can dedupe across applications and at the source.”

inSync 4.0 also has a new embedded storage engine that supports 16 TB of deduped data per server and 200 parallel connections. The product is based on the NoSQL Berkeley Database (BDB) that Druva OEMs from Oracle. BDB uses a small storage library instead of SQL optimizer layer, according to Singh, making it easier to download and install. Its new WAN optimization engine will choose the best packet size to control the amount of bandwidth uses and reduce latency, Singh says.

“There’s a lot of software for backing up servers that was modified to work with PCs, and then modified to work with laptops,” Singh said. “None were made specifically for laptops. But data backup is much more tricky than PCs. A person is either working or has the laptops switched off, so there’s no ideal time to back up a laptop.”

Is there room for another backup software player, even if it does specialize in an underserved market like laptop data protection? Singh says a few large organizations are using inSync, and he’s negotiating OEM deals with two North American partners to achieve wider distribution and product recognition. “The two issues we face are branding and pricing,” he said, an admission that inSync’s price of $55 per laptop license ($65 with support) is not cheap.

Druva recently received $5 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, and Singh said the three-year-old company will work out of the Sequoia Menlo Park, Calif. office until it sets up a U.S. headquarters. “We’re moving management and key sales people to U.S.,” he said. “We will be more-or-less a U.S. company.”

CommVault today gave preliminary revenue results for last quarter of approximately $66.3 million, below the approximately $71.7 million financial analysts expected. The new forecast would be about a 10% increase from a year ago and a 10% decrease from the previous quarter.

“We had a big miss here,” CommVault CEO Bob Hammer said on a conference call to discuss the results. Hammer called the results “very disappointing,” “surprising” and “unacceptable” and blamed the problems mainly on a restructured sales force.

“This was not the result of losing deals to a competitor,” he said.

Hammer said the reason for restructuring was to concentrate on more enterprise deals. He said after a strong previous quarter, the company overestimated its ability to close deals last quarter.

“We underestimated the distraction to our sales force and the ability to close forecasted deals by the end of the quarter,” he said. “To put it bluntly, we could’ve managed these processes more effectively.”

Still, he said he did not regret making the changes and he expects the “vast majority” of deals that slipped will close this quarter.

Hammer said market conditions in the U.K. and Europe also added to the problems. He said it is taking longer for companies to make buying decisions in those areas, resulting in an “unprecedentedly low level” of close rates. Government sales were also lower than he expected.

Hammer said he still expects CommVault’s revenue for the year to grow in double-digits, which would likely require strong sales this quarter. He said many deals that slipped past the end of last quarter have closed and CommVault is off to a good start for this quarter.

Hammer said he took a close look at the deals that did not close, and was confident those customers did not buy a competitor’s product. When asked about any changes in the competitive landscape, he said Symantec was weaker and EMC stronger, although he maintains that CommVault partner Dell’s decision to OEM EMC’s Data Domain deduplication target “wasn’t a major issue.” When asked about EMC’s products that compete with CommVault’s Simpana, Hammer said, “Legato [backup software] is still a relatively weak product. They’re doing well with Data Domain and OK with Avamar.”