Well, it has been about 3 days or so since I have returned from VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) in Las Vegas, and to be honest, still hasn’t been enough time to fully digest all of what I took in while at the conference. At the same time, I thought it would be a good idea to not delay it any further and work through some of the highlights of my involvement at VMware PEX in this Blog post with all of you. So, as hard as it may be to do, amongst thinking about all the great dinners and social events, along with epic experiments in Social Media exploits at tech conferences, what are some of the main themes I took away at PEX?

First off, the VMware Hands-On-Labs were once again well received by all the attendees, and continued to show the stability and scalability of VMware’s Lab infrastructure, serving up well over 20,000 Virtual Machines in 1800+ labs provisioned over the course of 4 days! Here are some photos to give you an idea of some of the highlights of the week from the HoLs:

Seats beginning to fill in on Monday morning!

Customers continue to enjoy labs throughout the week on the 120 stations available in the HoL.

This was the view of the stat display on Thursday morning (the last day the HoLs were offered).

I want to thank VMware for allowing EMC to be a partner and host a lab module (Lab 26) within the HoLs. I got a lot of good feedback from users running through the lab and that is definitely something great to hear. I am definitely looking forward to the continuation of the HoLs @ VMworld!

Within that feedback from HoL attendees and other conversations I had throughout the conference, it seems to me that from a Partner perspective, we already understand the need and value in shifting the way IT operations are performed to keep up with increasing business compute demands. It was already understood from walking in the door at this conference that this aspect of adopting the cloud model was assumed. For me, the question I started to see churning in attendees’ heads was what is the next big step?  For example, I felt everybody at the conference understood the basic infrastructure involved in delivering and implementing cloud services, but were ready to move on to thinking about “How do I really leverage that base infrastructure of ESXi servers and vCenter/vCloud infrastructures I have started to deploy and take my IT services to the next level for true iPad/Tablet like delivery model that my end users are asking for.”  This view was definitely at the fore front of conversation and PEX presentations, but let’s not also forget an interesting statistic brought up by Scott Aronson, SVP of Global Channels and Alliances for VMware (and highlighted in Scott Lowe’s blog here) during the first general session of the conference. He mentioned that enterprise customers are only 50% down the way of the virtualization path. On top of that, Small to Medium Business and Enterprises are less than 50% down that same journey. So it’s a good idea, while always anticipating the next turn on the journey, we don’t forget what we have been implementing from a technology foundation perspective to make sure all of our customers are ready to deploy Next Generation IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).

Which brings me to the role that I feel EMC can play as both a strong member and alliance with VMware in the Partner Ecosystem. During the EMC VMware PEX boot camp, a good portion of the discussion was dedicated to backup & recovery of virtualized environments. And rightly so, providing a tried and tested industry leading solution protecting and retaining data for a virtualized environment is key.  This theme wasn’t just something EMC was discussing in its presentations, but other partner presentations as well as attendee’s I talked to in my time spent on the Solutions Exchange floor and Hands-On-Labs. This is really where the rubber met the road – hearing from partners firsthand what they were looking for from a data protection perspective, and realizing during the conversation that the approaches taken by implementing EMC solutions met those needs nicely.

This sentiment and theme in the discussion I just mentioned was really summarized nicely by Brad Maltz from ICI who was gracious enough to share his time and words with our attendees in the EMC Boot camp. To paraphrase, he mentioned that EMC and it’s solutions have really enabled his organization to be a more consultative partner with his end users. Allowing him to be more of a trusted advisor to his customers for the long haul which is really where customers see the value add!

For me, that is the pinnacle of what we at EMC are working towards together with VMware in this continuing Journey our Industry is taking to the cloud. This I was glad to see.

Next Stop?! Back to the Venetian in Las Vegas for EMC World in May! See you there!

By Phil George, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Avamar

VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) is the premier industry event geared towards accelerating partners’ businesses in Cloud computing. There were hundreds of technical sessions, exhibitors, demos and boot camps.

EMC’s partner boot camp was standing room only. Chad Sakac (@sakacc) kicked things off with a fantastic two hour keynote highlighting the latest EMC and VMware solutions for the Cloud, along with his VIEW (pun intended) into the future. Ed Walsh, vSpecialist, and yours truly presented Optimized Backup & Recovery for the Cloud where we covered specific backup optimizations for VMware, next generation storage and backup for IT transformation, backing up vCloud Director with Avamar and protecting the VCE Vblock.

Don’t you wish you were there?

Nearly one thousand partners visited the EMC booth over the three days where they saw demos on next generation storage and backup for the cloud. EMC also featured their vLabs hands-on-labs at the booth and in the VMware lab area. There was a noticeable interest from new partners to join EMC or expand what products they are selling.

Amongst the hundred or so conversations I had, Jeff Ehrenhart from ISC summed it up nicely: “When we first started to work with customers on the virtualization journey our focus was on storage, but now we are helping our customers transform their IT infrastructure by bringing in EMC Avamar and Data Domain to truly optimize backup and recovery for not only their virtual environment, but the enterprise.” Jeff went on to say, “ISC has grown their business significantly by bringing next generation backup into the picture.

Backup as a Service (BaaS) was another hot topic at PEX as partners are expanding their service offerings by leveraging VMware, and EMC backup and recovery solutions.

To learn more about EMC Velocity Partner program – see Easy Street.

Also, please visit EMC Backup and Recovery.

See you at EMC World (May 21-24).

As many of you may know, back in 2009 EMC’s archiving solution, EmailXtender, was replaced with a next generation archiving solution, EMC SourceOne, a generalized object platform that supports archiving for email as well as Microsoft SharePoint and file system data. And, as with any newly architected solution, customers move to the new platform by either co-existence with the previous archival system, or perform a migration of data from the old architecture to the new.

In an effort to educate our customer base on the new SourceOne platform, I went on a “road show” to visit existing EmailXtender customers. At each and every customer site the question arose – To migrate, or not to migrate? I apprehensively broached this subject. “Have you thought about migrating?” Facial expressions say a lot, and in each case, I noticed a lot of apprehension. After meeting with a couple of clients I realized that migration is not a topic to be taken lightly. And it made me think – what’s so scary about migration, and why do normally stoic IT personalities cringe and cower when we mention the process of migrations?

Off to Wikipedia. “Data migration is generally the term used to describe a project where data will be moved or copied from one environment to another, and removed or decommissioned in the source. During the migration (which can take place over months or even years), data can flow in multiple directions, and there may be multiple migrations taking place simultaneously.” Months! Years! Sounds ominous.

The truth of the matter is, there’s nothing to fear! Lucky for our customers, EMC’s SourceOne engineers are one step ahead of the game and have been working feverishly to provide options to our EmailXtender customers for migration and co-existence, making the move painless and streamlined. In fact, with our 6.8 release of SourceOne, we have mastered the migration process with what is referred to as “In Place Migration (IPM).” Let’s review all the options that our EmailXtender customers have today.

• Coexistence. As a matter of fact, if a customer is moving off of EmailXtender to a new platform, SourceOne is the only solution on the market that allows “coexistence” of EmailXtender data. With this model there is one search across both platforms with complete chain of custody, where data expires on EmailXtender system before the EOSL (end of service life). No migration is required. Our customer at Wentworth Douglass Hospital utilizes this methodology, and told us “The fact that SourceOne is compatible with EmailXtender is a big plus, because it meant we didn’t have to spend time migrating all of the older e-mails to the SourceOne server – and the location of the e-mails is completely transparent to the user.” Scott Heffner, Network Operations Manager.
• Full migration. The perfect opportunity to perform both a data migration and a hardware refresh. Also great for customers that have refined their retention and disposition policies, and wish to re-ingest data with updated retention. The City of Surprise chose to perform a full migration of EmailXtender data to EMC SourceOne and stated “WAVE and EMC made sure the project was as seamless and trouble-free as possible; in fact, we were able to completely migrate 1.5 TB of data in only 15 days, about half the time originally estimated.” Manny Mejia.
• In Place Migration. For many, a full migration is not necessary, only the database and the indexes need to be consolidated, and the volumes of archives can remain in place. This proves to be the fastest and least costly migration alternative, and the best solution for those companies with huge amounts of historical archives.Early feedback around the SourceOne 6.8 product release including In Place Migration indicates that our EmailXtender customers couldn’t be happier.

Have it your way. EMC and our channel partners can help our EmailXtender customers move to SourceOne efficiently and cost effectively, and alleviate the fear associated with the migration. Contact us soon, it’s time to make the move!

Over the past couple of years, one of the key themes for NetWorker has been to make it easier to maintain and license. Included in this has been the consolidation of database and application modules. Previously, NetWorker depended on a lot of different modules for various database and application protection and many vendors still do this today. I was surprised when I spoke to a customer recently to hear that they were unaware of our consolidated modules, namely the NetWorker Module for Databases and Applications and NetWorker Module for Microsoft Applications. These two modules took 10 separate modules and boiled them down (see diagram).

Let’s talk a little more about the Networker Module for Databases and Applications (NMDA). It supports the most important cross-platform non-open source applications, in alphabetical order: DB2, Informix, Lotus, Oracle and Sybase. Support is offered on all platforms which are supported by both the applications vendor and the NetWorker client. In other words, if the application runs on a platform on which you can protect your files using NetWorker, you can also use NMDA for application-smart application-consistent data protection. The same “if NetWorker protects your files, it also protects your application” statement also applies to clusters. No porous/sparse support matrices, but rather a dense and complete matrix.

Here’s a list of other unique features that NMDA offers:

1. Deduplication
   • Data Domain: Use Data Domain Boost on the database host to send only unique blocks directly to the Data Domain Storage System.
   • Avamar: Use the Avamar grid as a backup device. There are no changes in your normal NetWorker workflows, simply check a box in the NetWorker Management Console to begin.
2. Wizards. Used for easy configuration of scheduled backups. Other backup vendors have “wizards” or “GUIs”, but nobody does it better than NetWorker. Our wizards are not one-offs. They are an integral part of the NetWorker Management Console.
   
3. Tight integration with EMC Arrays and Snapshots. As an example, suppose you want to use 4 Business Continuance Volumes (BCVs) for your Oracle backups. Perform an Oracle backup to BCV every 4 hours, and then move every 9th Oracle backup-to-BCV to tape. NMDA will do the rest – it will actually mount another host to the BCV and use this new host for the backup. This provides a zero-impact backup for your Oracle server. No fiddling with scripts, Oracle DBA queries, LUNs, etc, NetWorker and NMDA does it all for you.
4. Probe-based backups. Have you ever wanted to start a backup when “it’s the right time”, but you don’t know when that time will happen? For example, what if you had a database that suddenly saw an increase in activity and you wanted to guarantee a backup. Using probe-based backups, you could set it to automatically start when more than 200GB of logs have accumulated since the previous backup. A probe-based backup makes it easy without scripts.

Finally, NMDA also offers all the standard functionality offered by NetWorker for file backups; push upgrades, stage to disk and move to tape, clone to a remote site, get backup completion reports, and more.

Get your trial copy today.

Now, while I don’t necessarily agree with pinning a football loss (or victory) on any single person, one technology – PBBA – has undoubtedly changed the face of backup.

So, you know what I think… but what do others have to say? Users, industry experts and the media have all chimed in about PBBA with stories, industry-supporting research data and good-old market analysis. In an effort to fulfill our promise to you to provide a 360° view of backup and recovery, below is a “snapshot” of the various conversations going on in the market. As you click through the info that follows, if you agree or disagree with any of the analysis below, have a story to share or simply want more information, just post a quick comment or question below.

• Backup to the Future by EMC CTO and TBW Blogger Stephen Manley on Spiceworks.com: “Virtualization has become the proving grounds for disk backup solutions – only the best survive. I’ve met many customers happily rolling out virtualization at warp speed. And I’ve heard countless tales of woe. “We can’t fully load our ESX servers because backups never complete.” “We can’t virtualize our Tier 1 applications because backup load kills performance.” “I’m constantly installing agents, tweaking backup schedules and praying nobody wants to restore.” Visions of dynamic virtualized environments have transformed into nightmares of mindless grunt work. How did things go so wrong for them?”

• IDC Ups Revenue Forecast for Purpose Built Backup Appliances and Shows EMC with Big Lead in Growing PBBA Market by former end-user and current storage analyst Jerome Wendt on DCIG.com: “Giving preference to PBBAs over other approaches to backup is maybe what is most notable about this upgraded IDC forecast. Organizations clearly view PBBAs as a better way to address their long standing backup challenges and are implementing PBBAs at a pace faster than what even IDC anticipated.”

• ESG Research Report: 2012 IT Spending Intentions Survey: Protecting, virtualizing and managing IT assets remain top IT priorities.

• EMC Leads Backup Appliance Market: Report on ITwire.com. “We believe this explosive growth will continue through 2015 and is a result of users’ desire for improved backup window timing, faster recovery times, effective virtual server protection and seamless integration with existing backup applications.  We also believe customers are gravitating towards PBBA solutions as a way to control their data protection capital and operational expenditures.”

• Can Anything Stop EMC? on ecommercetimes.com: “Bottom line: As has been demonstrated many times before, conventional wisdom is far more conventional than it is wise. The IT industry is big and diverse enough to provide enormous opportunities for vendors quick and quick-witted enough to seize them, which brings us to EMC.”

• Daughters of Charity Health System Improves IT Efficiency and Accelerates Time-to-treatment with EMC, Michael Day, DCHS Director of Information Technology, comments on its PBBA deployment: “With VMware and EMC, we’re able to automatically back up all of our virtual machines. We also can move virtual machines from one server to another if we need to run firmware updates or if a server unexpectedly goes down. VMware and EMC are integral components of our business continuity strategy.”

Don’t drop the ball!

For some of you, the trends of 2011 may be your 2012 future. For those who have already taken those steps, we have some predictions about what’s awaiting you in 2012.

1)     We’re all backup admins now. Over the last decade, we became an increasingly data-centric world. Without data, the virtual machines, applications, and storage systems don’t do much. Since data is so important, everyone – application, virtual server, storage and backup administrators – wants more control over the protection of their data. With versioned replication becoming available to each of these administrators (Trend #1 from 2011), each team can run its own backups. Disk democratizes backup. Versioned replication delivers the performance that revolutionizes the backup process. The change will apply pressure to two areas:

• Backup software will have to more fully embrace federations (Trend #3 from 2011). The backup application may not always touch the data since the application or hypervisor team may be running their own backups to the centralized backup storage. The backup application, however, must provide centralized visibility and control over all the protection processes in the company.

• Storage-based versioned replication will have to evolve. While storage-based versioned replication was once on the cutting edge of data protection, it needs to innovate to remain relevant. Users demand protection policies at a VM or application granularity – not at a storage container (LUN, file system, volume) granularity. If the storage array cannot meet their versioned replication needs, their backup software, application or hypervisor can.

2)     Backup appliances – quality is job #1. In the past few years, the backup appliance market has focused on speeds and feeds. How fast? How big? While performance and scale will continue to be important, the mantra in 2012 will be “storage of last resort.” As you eliminate tape (Trend #2 from 2011), there is no safety net underneath your backup appliance (and if you do have tape, I’m not sure that’s the safety net you want to trust your business to). When you think about quality of the storage of last resort, remember to ask one thing: “When I need to restore – 5 minutes, 5 months or 5 years from now, will my data be there?” If you’re not sure, why are you wasting your money?

3)     Backup onsite, DR to the cloud. As small and medium businesses and mid-sized enterprises embrace disk (Trend #2 from 2011), their processes must change. They can’t stash their backup appliance in the trunk of their car or under their bed. They need that system to handle today’s restores and tonight’s backups. Meanwhile, they don’t have the bandwidth or faith in the cloud to eliminate all local backup copies. This is the perfect opportunity to add more powerful disaster recovery (DR) to their arsenal. They can efficiently replicate backups offsite to the cloud. Most often, the cloud will be a service offered by their local reseller, to help cope with trust and bandwidth concerns. Regardless of the provider, deduplicated backups and versioned replication will converge backup and DR – and accelerate some organizations’ journey to the cloud – even as they keep their most recent backup copies onsite.

Even a CTO isn’t reckless enough to predict that, in 150 years, there will be multiple magazines debating the battles that transformed the data protection industry in 2012 (but only because I predict that all magazines will be about the American Civil War by then). The world of data protection is changing in profound ways. Over the last 10 years, we have built up the necessary deduplicated disk infrastructure for the revolution. For the first time in memory, you have the chance to regain control, instead of trying to just hang on. You have the opportunity to shape your destiny, instead of merely reacting to others’ actions. You can truly lead the way to a better future. 2012 can be your year.

Calling all partners! VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) 2012 Feb 12 -16 in Las Vegas offers a fantastic conference to accelerate your business and learn how VMware and VMware Partners solutions can transform your customers’ data centers for new levels of efficiencies and cost savings. Don’t gamble by missing this conference – register today!

A few highlights…

EMC will be holding its partner boot camp all day on Monday Feb 13^th featuring numerous speakers and topics. By popular demand, the session on Optimized Backup and Recovery for VMware Environments returns with even more technical information. This session will cover image-level backup and restore, next generation storage and backup, backing up vCloud Director and VCE Vblock protection.

The PEX exhibitor pavilion features the EMC booth with 8 demonstration pods – including 2 hands-on-lab pods. The Backup and Recovery pod will feature demonstrations on image-level backup and Changed Block Restore, backing up vCloud Director and mission-critical application Backup. You can also try hands-on-labs for Changed Block Restore, Microsoft Exchange and SQL backup and desktop/laptop backup.

Register today and be sure to sign up for the EMC Boot Camp. Want more information? Check out Chad’s PEX post.

See you there!

At EMC, our channel business is growing like gangbusters (we’re talking about 50%+ year over year growth).   To put that in perspective – with the Dell/EMC divorce, more than $1B in revenues not only has moved to EMC’s channel partners, but it actually grew and grew substantially.

That along with VNXe (CRN best storage product of the year – a cool “top 15 list” along with the Intel core i7, Mac OSX, Samsung Galaxy tablets, iPad2), and huge investments in our channel (BTW, CRN also named EMC company of the year in three categories), and huge expansions of VNX and Isilon channel GTM.

I just finished up the EMC leadership meeting (~400 EMCers in a few days of intimate discussion), and we are doubling down – 2012 will be the “year of the channel” at EMC (and that’s coming off a killer 2011!)

A little sidebar:

Ergo, thanks very much Dell. While the divorce wasn’t something we didn’t ask for, and certainly didn’t drive – well, it turned out to be a very good thing.  While we loved that partnership, and it was one of the best IT partnerships for more than a decade, you made a choice, and it turned out to be good for EMC and our partners. How is it’s working for you?

So… for us, VMware PEX is one of the biggest events of the year, and we’ll be there with bells on.

Here’s the scoop when it comes to EMC/VMware:

• The EMC bootcamp will be all day on Monday the 13th (details should be on the VMware site by the end of this week). This is THE place to be if you’re an VMware and EMC partner.We’ll be:
  • In the keynote (I’ll be there), we’ll be disclosing the 2012 roadmap, and our 2013 ambitions (competitors, you’re welcome to join – when you see, you’ll want to join
  • opening up the changes we’re making to make tools more open, and working on being easier to do business with every day.
  • Sharing more virtual appliances (which everyone loves)
  • Opening up the vLab to you all (this will blow you mind)
  • Sharing new solutions around virtualizing mission critical apps, accelerating and simplifying EUC, accelerating the management portfolio (think of 2012 as the year of vCOPS IMO), and also vCD at your customers.
  • For partners who are service providers also, we’ll be making announcements around doubling down on our already awesome SP program.
• We will be running a hands-on-lab during the whole week.  This is an opportunity to test out everything EMC and VMware – basically anything you want, but also talk to experts, engineering, vSpecialists, and share your thoughts.   It’s really cool – runs out of our vLab demo cloud in Durham, NC (which all runs on Vblock and vSphere)
• I (and the whole EMC team) want to hear what we’re doing wrong, and what we need to do better – it’s a great opportunity for us to listen, and to help you help your customers, and your business.

What more should we add… and I can’t wait to see you there!

Syndicated from Virtual Geek.

Just look at IDC’s latest data:

• Year-over-year revenue growth increased from $2.1B (24.4%) to $2.8B (65.5%).
• CAGR increased from 16.6% to 25.6%.

Wowsa!  Changes in today’s data center – notably, the explosion of virtualization, the ramp-up to the cloud and even expectations around big data demands  – are changing the way we think about backup and recovery and, more importantly, the purchasing decisions we’re making.

Why is PBBA growing faster than any other backup category? IDC says it’s because PBBAs improve backup window time, provide faster restore and enable seamless integration with existing backup applications. Customers and other industry analyst firms cite a variety of business and technology benefits, including continual and uninterruptable business processes, lower infrastructure costs, reduced backup windows, more scalable virtual server protection and consistent backups.

How long will this trend continue? IDC believes it will continue for the foreseeable future as organizations continue to take advantage of the PBBA’s rich feature-sets, again particularly for virtual server protection, rapid recovery and data deduplication.

What choices do you have? The market abounds with options. Over the past four months, Stephen Manley, EMC’s backup recovery systems CTO and TBW blogger, has been writing on this subject. His multi-part blog series – Choices Matter: Don’t Get Caught with Your Pants on the Ground – puts industry research, like IDC’s, in context. The series examines key technologies (versioned replication) you should be looking into if you’re not already and shares customer stories – the good, the bad and the ugly. A must read if you’ve got PBBA or are just considering it.

Oh, and did I mention, EMC, with 62.0% of the $1.2 billion spent on PBBA solutions and 63.5% of the raw TBs shipped, is the clear market leader in the PBBA market? A shameless plug, I know. But if you translate these numbers into market share, we’ve got more than 3x the share of our nearest competitor, and that means something.

For those of us who have watched customers flock to disk-based data protection solutions like a phototropic plant bending toward light, 2011 marked the end of a remarkable 10-year run. The shift to disk started slowly with low-cost ATA disk arrays and burst into hyper-drive with deduplication. Within the last 10 years, the question shifted from – “Why would I put disk in my backup infrastructure?” to “You don’t have a dedupe backup appliance?!?”

As deduplicated disk accelerated its inexorable march (would that now make it a relentless double march?) to displace other backup media, we tracked three key emerging trends.

1. Versioned replication – it ain’t just for storage anymore. For the last decade, storage vendors have waxed eloquently about versioned replication between two of their storage arrays. “You can back up only changed data and storing each version as a space optimized full!” In 2011, non-storage vendors embraced versioned replication, to customer acclaim. Versioned replication has finally moved from niche to mainstream. Users aren’t asking “should they implement it” but “how or where they should implement it” – at the backup, storage, application or virtual sever layer?
2. Going tapeless – less talking and more tossing. We’ve had discontent with tape, catchy slogans and explosive growth in backup appliances. Still, prior to 2011, most customers saw truly “going tapeless” as an aspiration, not a plan. And, in 2011, many companies crossed the tipping point. They proved the stability of dedupe disk, bought new cost-effective disk-based solutions for long-term archival (e.g., Data Domain Archiver) and drove pragmatic negotiations to set sensible retention policies (“keep it forever” being the business equivalent of renting multiple apartments to hold all your old People magazines). The result? Many companies have rolled tape straight out the door (see video below).
3. One ring will not rule them all; a federation will unite them. Backup teams stopped fantasizing about exercising absolute control by consolidating onto one centralized backup solution that they own. With complex legacy environments, mergers/acquisitions, a broad constituency of stakeholders (e.g., storage, application, and hypervisor admins) and new workloads (e.g., big data), the goal isn’t one-size-fits-all homogeneity. Instead, successful groups provide centralized backup storage services that can serve their broad and distributed backup constituency. Once they’ve regained control over the actual backup data, they use data protection management tools (e.g., EMC Data Protection Adviser) to gain visibility into their federated protection environments. This insight enables them to provide even better services for their customers.

For some of you, the trends of 2011 may be your 2012 future. For those who have already taken those steps, we have some predictions about what’s awaiting you in 2012. But you’ll have to tune in next week to find out. By then, we will have – “Chumbawamba – Where are They Now?” for you. (We would do “Tape – Where is it Now?” as well, but I made a New Year’s Resolution to avoid dark, depressing places.)