Dmitri Chen, Vice President, EMC Backup and Recovery Practice, Asia Pacific and Japan, talks to KTP Radhika about the challenges faced by CIOs, benefits of deduplication and how it is transforming the backup space. Excerpts…
With big data pouring in, what are the challenges that CIOs are facing in redesigning their backup infrastructure?
Big data is delivering a lot of value to the businesses and is one of the major trend in the backup space. However, since data is growing massively, companies are worried about how they can control the huge data growth. Research firm IDC estimates that by 2020, there will be 35 zeta bytes of information out there. All this data will put more and more pressure on backup teams to transform their environments.
There are a lot of limitations for the traditional back up environment to tackle the situation. EMC has end-to-end solutions in this space. EMC Avamar is a fast, efficient backup and recovery through a complete software and hardware solution equipped with integrated variable-length deduplication technology.
How is cloud transforming the back up and recovery space?
Cloud is one of the most discussed topics in the backup space. Most of the IT operations are now available on the ‘as a service’ model and backup is certainly one of those areas. Organizations opt for cloud because they want to improve their responsiveness to business needs. Our own customers have now started changing their IT operations to ‘as a service’ model so that they can address the demands of their end-users.
More and more customers are looking at how they can scale their business by leveraging hybrid and public cloud. Backup has to become an integrated, seamless part of the journey to the cloud, and to do this successfully, backup teams need to transform their environment to be more flexible and smarter.
EMC has a lot of opportunities here and can help companies in that journey. Collaborating with our partners, we are helping our customers to set up a backup-as-a-service environment. In India, we work with service providers such as Tulip, Netmagic, Crtl S, Tata Communication, etc. They offer backup as a service using our technology.
How will cloud based backup benefit small and medium size businesses (SMBs)?
The benefit for SMB customers in the backup space is that they don’t have any legacy baggage. So they can architect their data protection strategy right at the first time, depending on their environment. And cloud is a perfect way for starting. They can choose their data protection strategy on a private cloud, public cloud or a hybrid cloud according to their industry needs.
In your view, what are the major benefits of deduplication? How will it transform the backup space?
Deduplication is ideal for highly redundant operations like backup, which requires repeatedly copying and storing the same data set multiple times for recovery purposes. As a result, enterprises of all sizes rely on backup and recovery with deduplication for fast, reliable, cost-effective backup and recovery. We have a portfolio of products that are designed to address specific customer problems, however one size doesn’t fit all.
Over the last year or so, we have seen an enormous interest among our customers for de-duplicated disk-based backup solution. Before that, customers used to debate about the viability and justification of a de-duplicated disk-based backup solution, since the customer mind set was that it is very expensive. But over the last one year, we have see a massive adoption of deduplicated disk as a backup target.
This has happened because, when we use dedupliaction as a technology, the amount of physical storage that is required to backup the data goes down dramatically. So you no longer need to buy 100 TB of disk to backup 10 TB of storage. You need only 10TB of disk for 10TB of storage. And the cost difference between tapes and disks are not so huge any more.
Secondly, the customers are attaching more value for their information. With increasing risks involved with information, legacy backup applications won’t provide much scalability to organizations. The best way to attain growth is deduplicate the data. It will increase the scalability. With massive data growth, we have to standardize the backup platforms and an automated deduplication platform will definitely help in managing the massive data growth.
