There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

Yes, it’s blasphemy to simply change a classic like Buffalo Springfield’s “For What’s It Worth” – but I will anyway to prove my point.

There’s something happening here

If you haven’t noticed, IT is changing rapidly. Just search for IT transformation, IT as a Service, and converged infrastructure to see how far we’ve come in only the past few years.  This industry moves!

What it is ain’t exactly clear

We know a Cloud is built differently, operated differently, and consumed differently. So we know companies have begun re-architecting IT in order to offer more of a service in order to react faster to meet user needs. They know they must change their operational models and in many cases their organizational structure. They might also seek converged infrastructures to get moving faster.    But… has protection changed to keep pace with this transformation?

There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

It’s been said that in the song the gun is more of a metaphor for the tension between groups within the US before Vietnam. And in a much less violent analogy, the tension between the IT team and the application owners has never been stronger.

The application teams want to have great performance and protection of their application. But they’ve never been empowered by the IT department to protect themselves with storage-level tools. The storage team wants to let them, but they fear they might create too many copies of their data. Instead, the app owners went out and used tools for their own application, creating their own protection strategy which might not deliver the best protection they can get.  To win back the hearts and minds of the application owners and DBA’s, the IT department and the storage teams need to get better at protecting applications as a service.

On the Road to Application Protection as a Service

Many companies have has attempted to do this in the past – with products that help you protect and restore your applications and critical virtual machines. They have tools that install on the server and can “freeze” and “thaw” the current transactions into the database, so that when a snapshot is taken, there is a clean copy that can be easily restored.  The major benefit of these tools is SPEED as the copy process is incremental and the restore process is also lightning fast.  Restoring a 1 TB database in minutes.

It needs to get easier. Like any “enterprise” tool, many of these products designed for snapshots and replication require a significant learning curve. We need something simple that integrates with the tools we know and love.

We should provide self-service capabilities. Instead of spending hours and hours making sure application owners are getting the protection they need, they should be empowered to simply protect and restore their own data.

We are driven by service levels. IT departments and storage teams need to offer “protection service catalogs” with various (e.g. Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze) levels of protection varied by RPO – from very low data loss (synchronous replication) to more sporadic application-consistent snapshots – all from one interface. This makes it easy for the app team and people with the checkbooks to really understand the value placed on the different applications in your catalog.

There truly is something happening here
And what is will be made clear at EMC World 2012!

Hope to see you there!
Brian