No Buffering with Recovery please!

BANGALORE, INDIA: Recovery at the snap of a finger; Back-up tip-toeing in the Cloud - so much is going on as enterprises try to make sense of new trends on one hand and new business constraints on the other hand.

Kumar Mitra, General Manager, Data Backup & Recovery, DellSoftware, APJ shares some slices of a new circle that is enveloping the storage industry with a new radius.

What would you reckon as trends worth watching in current market?

There is a massive explosion of data like never before and entire business of back-up and recovery function which was usually offline or slotted for after-office hours, is undergoing a big shift. Now businesses work longer and closer to customers so they cannot afford to put back-up on the boundary. This is also causing a unique situation of a larger size of data but of shrinking back-up windows. That's a challenge for enterprises today. That also means that customers need simple, automated recovery solutions today.

Making the recovery context simpler is not easy then?

At Dell, we do not treat all data as equal. Some applications are mission-critical and some data is business-critical. Some of the data buckets are for archiving and some for compliance. So we need to answer that question first - how much downtime can I afford? Instead of having a product being fitted in back-up space, we would rather first find out the right questions. This is how solutions at Dell are viewed.

Have things become fuzzier with the presence of cloud-based storage and names like Drop Box, Open Stack etc flitting around?

Cloud is one of the biggest disruptors of this space. The good news is that it gives scale. Some go at it in an outsourcing mode, some in a private cloud manner and some in a mixed formula. We work beautifully with Cloud environments for back-up and recovery so we, at least, look at the Cloud phenomenon as an opportunity.

How would Hadoop and in-memory disruptions translate here?

We create certification and support of these new formats like in-memory. They improve efficiency but not much is happening on an architectural level yet.

Is Instant recovery still a paper-pie?

Ten years back when people heard of the concept they dissed it as something that won't work. But customers have started understanding and identifying new opportunities, as they address applications with a strategy. It is no more a buzzword and lot of customers are adopting it. We at Dell can actually show recovery in a matter of minutes. A strong adoption curve is what I see here.

Any take on Solid State Storage or Fluid Cache?

Yes, the storage story has evolved a lot on bars like faster, cheaper etc. But it is also important to optimize your storage. When we work with a customer, we want to optimize with de-duplication appliances and that's a good way to take it up for both back-up and recovery.