Back-up Baby, Back-up!

Pratima H

MUMBAI, INDIA: Data is no more the good old water in the well it used to be. It's constantly rising and condensing into clouds, oceans and sometimes, even evaporating.

Hardly a few days back, Forrester came out with another interesting re-inforcement of Big Data’s big drilling around. It feels that Big Data spend will rise by five per cent to eight per cent in 2015. As Forrester sees it, the future of big data is bright, with implementation plans taking flight in 2015 and that also means pulling up socks on many architectural shifts that seem to be around the corner. Specially where data hubs become digital insights platforms that reshape how data is prepared, governed, and acquired, seamlessly turning data to insight and insight to action. Yes, you can see the part – how data is acquired and governed!

Last May, Gartner had also reminded specifically about the changes in Indian IT infrastructure market, comprising of server, storage and networking equipment, which witnessed a four per cent increase from 2013, and was said to be poised to turn into a $2.35 billion market by 2017.

Take a look at a recent Zinnov study that outlines India domestic IT market to be sized at $ 36 Billion in 2015; and to be driven by up gradation of legacy systems, growing acceptance of cloud based solutions, emerging technologies like Big Data, among other factors.

Also note that the total Cloud market in India is estimated to grow at 45 per cent CAGR to 14.8 Billion and that cloud contribution to IT spend can rise to 17 per cent of overall market by 2020. The Public Cloud Market in India is $ 700 -800 Million in 2015 and will rise to $7.0-7.4 Billion in 2020 while Private Cloud Market in India is 1.6-1.8 Billion in 2015 and will rise to 7.4-7.6 Billion in 2020, as per the report released by Zinnov Management Consulting on “India’s Domestic IT Market Landscape 2015.

Now look at the other side of this expanding room for Big Data, Cloud and new architecture stacks of information. Would it mean a new landscape of data back-up and recovery? Does this deluge of new data piles, sources and data camping sites make the CIO’s job more nightmarish than it ever was?

An IT vendor also pointed in 2014 that in India, data loss and downtime were costing enterprises over $54 billion and that companies worldwide lost 400 per cent more data on average over the previous two years. Numerous studies like these have highlighted the conspicuous absence of confidence of IT fraternity and enterprises in securing the data that they constantly pour and stack. Workloads have changed and so have their model boxes, and whether it is Big Data, mobility or Cloud, the challenge of having a watertight recovery mechanism just gets all the more wider stares as months roll by. A recent survey by Dell says that more than 64 percent of organizations agree that there is a need to restructure/reorganize their IT processes, and be more collaborative with other departments to stay ahead of the next security threat. It's a world suddenly full of words like SDS, Hybrid Cloud, SaaS, Webscale apps, RTO, RPO, DeDupe, Flash and Open hardware; and yet the conventional hygiene factor of having data on a ready stand-by exists as stubbornly as ever.

We get a chance to explore this conundrum with Kumar Mitra - General Manager -Data Protection, APJ - Dell Software. Mitra has been handling the Dell Software Data Protection portfolio for Asia Pacific and Japan and he helps to nail some questions around new environments, new data anchorages, and the changing face and walls of storage and recovery. Let’s jump right in.

Why is your job different than what it was some years back?

Lots of changes have happened in the recent past. Data has grown tremendously. Expectations of businesses on availability of data have similarly gone up. Back-up space has been redefined with expectations of application availability in a round-the-clock way. So organizations which have invested in back-up five years back too are relooking at it from a new lens, with security and new requirements driving it. There is also emergence of differentiated SLAs for different data sets. Continuous optimization of back-up is the new order. Organizations today, irrespective of their sizes, are generating tons of data every second which is later analysed and utilized for the benefit of the organization. A new generation of threats are stemming from megatrends and technologies such as BYOD, mobility, cloud computing, and Internet usage, as well as internal actions both accidental and malicious,  that introduce organizations to a multitude of new risks and new data concerns.

How has it changed things at Dell?

At Dell, we have integrated all our acquired and own assets together and now we have differentiated positioning for different data sets and various recovery requirements. It could be virtualization, mission-critical areas or business continuity needs; they can have different SLA aspects. Dell gives an end-to-end answer, nonetheless.

Have changes in Storage like Flash been crucial factors?

Flash has been about speed and data back-up with a new storage story. From 5 TBs (Terabytes) of data with a ten-hour recovery window, we have come to 50 TBs and a two hour window. How to optimize that - is a consistent question.

Does SDS (Software Defined Storage) matter enough and can it juggle various issues like Cloud economics, modularity, and existing infrastructure blocks well?

SDS is here to stay and it is not just another trending word. Dell has a relationship with Nutanix, Red Hat etc and we are working on optimization of stored infrastructure. Our solutions work with SDS as well as other infrastructure scenarios. We actually work very well with SDS.

Is recovery and data assurance possibly a clincher for cloud adoption, specially for people still locked in security or availability concerns?

Yes, in fact one study that we did shows the importance of back-up for next three years, and it will increase its cloud footprint massively. India will be at the forefront of this rise.

What makes back-up and recovery much more challenging and complex today?

Both these areas are like insurance. No one wants it to be so cumbersome and hassle-ridden that it defeats the basic purpose. That’s what we have been trying to do – something that is easy to install, to manage and to recover. We do not talk about the word ‘back-up’ anymore as often as this is a hygiene factor. It is now all about how quickly can someone recover data and that’s the ROI.

Being agnostic helps here?

Our solutions can fit well whether it is custom-made hardware or Dell hardware. Our platform is neutral and flexible. Most enterprises have a mixed environment and our solutions complement with existing customer infrastructures with little performance difference in different environments. We are very comfortable working with many environments. We have refreshed our portfolio last year and our focus on heterogeneous environments, virtualized, DeDupe-based and mission-critical ones has gone up. Appliance-based solutions and mixed-workloads suites work well.