Transcript of a sponsored BriefingDirect podcast on how data-recovery products can provide quicker access to data and analysis.

1. Data Explosion and Big Data Require New Strategies for
Data Management and Recovery
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingDirect podcast on how data-recovery products can provide
quicker access to data and analysis.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Quest Software
Dana Gardner: Hi. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on why businesses need a better approach to
their data recovery capabilities. We'll examine how major trends like
virtualization, big data, and calls for comprehensive and automated data
management, are driving the need for change.
The current landscape for data management, backup, and disaster recovery
(DR), too often ignores the transition from physical to virtualized
environment and sidesteps the heightened real-time role that data now plays
in enterprise. [Disclosure: Quest Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect
podcasts.]
What's needed are next-generation, integrated, and simplified approaches, the fast backup and
recovery that spans all essential corporate data. The solution therefore means bridging legacy and
new data, scaling to handle big data, implementing automation and governance, and integrating
the functions of backup protection and DR.
The payoffs come in the form of quicker access to needed data and analytics, highly protected
data across its lifecycle, ease in DR, and overall improved control and management of key assets,
especially by non-specialized IT administrators.
To share insights into why data recovery needs a new approach and how that can be
accomplished, we're joined by two experts. We're here with John Maxwell, Vice President of
Product Management for Data Protection at Quest Software. Welcome to the show, John.
John Maxwell: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Gardner: We're also here with Jerome Wendt. He is the President and Lead Analyst of DCIG, an
independent storage analyst and consulting firm. Welcome, Jerome.
Jerome Wendt: Thank you Dana. It's a pleasure to join the call.
Gardner: Let me posit my first question to you, Jerome. I'm sensing a major shift in how
companies view and value their data assets. Is data really a different thing than, say, five years
ago in terms of how companies view it and value it?

2. Wendt: Absolutely. There's no doubt that companies are viewing it much more holistically. It
used to be just data that was primarily in structured databases, or even semi-
structured format, such as email, was where all the focus was. Clearly, in the
last few years, we've seen a huge change, where unstructured data now is the
fastest growing part of most enterprises and where even a lot of their
intellectual property is stored. So I think there is a huge push to protect and
mine that data.
But we're also just seeing more of a push to get to edge devices. We talk a lot
about PCs and laptops, and there is more of a push to protect data in that area,
but all you have to do is look around and see the growth.
When you go to any tech conference, you see iPads everywhere, and people are storing more
data in the cloud. That's going to have an impact on how people and organizations manage their
data and what they do with it going forward.
Gardner: John Maxwell, it seems that not that long ago, data was viewed as a byproduct of
business, Now, for more and more companies, data is the business, or at least the analytics that
they derive from it. Has this been a sea change, from your perspective?
Mission critical
Maxwell: It’s funny that you mention that, because I've been in the storage business for over 15
years. I remember just 10 years ago, when studies would ask people what
percentage of their data was mission critical, it was maybe around 10 percent.
That aligns with what you're talking about, the shift and the importance of
data.
Recent surveys from multiple analyst groups have now shown that people
categorize their mission-critical data at 50 percent. That's pretty profound, in
that a company is saying half the data that we have, we can't live without, and
if we did lose it, we need it back in less than an hour, or maybe in minutes or
seconds.
Gardner: So we have a situation where more data is considered important, they need it faster,
and they can't do without it. It’s as if our dependency on data has become heightened and ever-
increasing. Is that a fair characteristic, Jerome?
Wendt: Absolutely.
Gardner: So given the requirement of having access to data and it being more important all the
time, we're also seeing a lot of shifting on the infrastructure side of things. There's much more
movement towards virtualization, whole new ways of storage when it comes to trying to reduce
the overall cost of that, reducing duplication and that sort of business. How is the shift and the

3. change in infrastructure impacting this simultaneous need for access and criticality? Let's start
with you, John.
Maxwell: Well, the biggest change from an infrastructure standpoint has been the impact of
virtualization. This year, well over 50 percent of all the server images in the world are virtualized
images, which is just phenomenal.
Quest has really been in the forefront of this shift in infrastructure. We have been, for example,
backing up virtual machines (VMs) for seven years with
our Quest vRanger product. We've seen that evolve from
when VMs or virtual infrastructure were used more for test
and dev. Today, I've seen studies that show that the shops
that are virtualized are running SQL Server, Microsoft
Exchange, very mission-critical apps.
We have some customers at Quest that are 100 percent virtualized. These are large organizations,
not just some mom and pop company. That shift to virtualization has really made companies
assess how they manage it, what tools they use, and their approaches. Virtualization has a large
impact on storage and how you backup, protect, and restore data.
Gardner: John, it sounds like you're saying that it's an issue of complexity, but from a lot of the
folks I speak to, when they get through it at the end of their journey through virtualization, they
find that there are a lot of virtuous benefits to be extended across the data lifecycle. Is it the case
that this is not all bad news, when it comes to virtualization?
Maxwell: No. Once you implement and have the proper tools in place, your virtual life is going
to be a lot easier than your physical one from an IT infrastructure perspective. A lot of people
initially moved to virtualization as a cost savings, because they had under-utilization of
hardware. But one of the benefits of virtualization is the freedom, the dynamics. You can create a
new VM in seconds. But then, of course, that creates things like VM sprawl, the amount of data
continues to grow, and the like.
At Quest we've adapted and exploited a lot of the features that exist in virtual environments, but
don't exist in physical environments. It’s actually easier to protect and recover virtual
environments than it is physical, if you have tools that are exploiting the APIs and the
infrastructure that exists in that virtual environment.
Significant benefits
Gardner: Jerome, do you concur that, when you are through the journey, when you are doing
this correctly, that a virtualized environment gives you significant benefits when it comes to
managing data from a lifecycle perspective?
Wendt: Yes, I do. One of the things I've clearly seen is that it really makes it more of a business
enabler. We talk a lot these days about having different silos of data. One application creates data

4. that stays over here. Then, it's backed up separately. Then, another application or another group
creates data back over here.
Virtualization not only means consolidation and cost savings, but it also facilitates a more
holistic view into the environment and how data is managed. Organizations are finally able to get
their arms around the data that they have.
Before, it was so distributed that they didn't really have a good sense of where it resided or how
to even make sense of it. With virtualization, there are initial cost benefits that help bring it
altogether, but once it's altogether, they're able to go to the next stage, and it becomes the
business enabler at that point.
Gardner: I suppose the key now is to be able to manage, automate, and bring the comprehensive
control and governance to this equation, not just the virtualized workloads, but also of course the
data that they're creating and bringing back into business processes.
So what about that? What’s this other trend afoot? How do we move from sprawl to control and
make this flip from being a complexity issue to a virtuous adoption and benefits issue? Let's start
with you, John.
Maxwell: Over the years, people had very manual processes. For example, when you brought a
new application online or added hardware, server, and that type of thing, you asked, "Oops, did
we back it up? Are we backing that up?"
One thing that’s interesting in a virtual environment is that the backup software we have at Quest
will automatically see when a new VM is created and start backing it up. So it doesn't matter if
you have 20 or 200 or 2,000 VMs. We're going to make sure they're protected.
Where it really gets interesting is that you can protect the data a lot smarter than you can in a
physical environment. I'll give you an example.
In a VMware environment, there are services that we can use to do a snapshot backup of a VM.
In essence, it’s an immediate backup of all the data associated with that machine or those
machines. It could be on any generic kind of hardware. You don’t need to have proprietary
hardware or more expensive software features of high-end disk arrays. That is a feature that we
can exploit built within the hypervisor itself.
Image backup
Even the way that we move data is much more efficient, because we have a process that we
pioneered at Quest called "backup once, restore many," where we create what's called image
backup. From that image backup I can restore an entire system, individual file, or an application.
But I've done that from that one path, that one very effective snapshot-based backup.

5. If you look at physical environments, there is the concept of doing physical machine backups and
file level backups, specific application backups, and for some systems, you even have to employ
a hardware-based snapshots, or you actually had to bring the applications down.
So from that perspective, we've gotten much more sophisticated in virtual environments. Again,
we're moving data by not impacting the applications themselves and not impacting the VMs. The
way we move data is very fast and is very effective.
Gardner: Jerome, when we start to do these sorts of activities, whether we are backing up at
very granular level or even thinking about mirroring entire data centers, how does governance,
management, and automation come to play here? Is this something that couldn’t have been done
in the physical domain?
Wendt: I don’t think it could have been done on the physical domain, at least not very easily. We
do these buyer’s guides on a regular basis. So we have a chance to take in-depth looks at all these
different backup software products on the market and how they're evolving.
One of the things we are really seeing, also to your point, is just a lot more intelligence going
into this backup software. They're moving well beyond just “doing backups” any more. There's
much more awareness of what data is included in these data repositories and how they're
searched.
And also with more integration with platforms like vSphere Center, administrators can centrally
manage backups, monitor backup jobs, and do recoveries. One person can do so much more than
they could even a few years ago.
And really the expectation of organizations is evolving that they don’t want to necessarily want
separate backup admin and system admin anymore. They want one team that manages their
virtual infrastructure. That all kind of rolls up to your point where it makes it easy to govern,
manage, and execute on corporate objectives.
Gardner: I think it’s important to try to filter how this works than in terms of total cost. If you're
adding, as you say, more intelligence to the process, if you don’t have separate administrators for
each function, if you are able to provide a workflow approach to your data lifecycle, you have
fewer duplications, you're using less total storage, you're able to support the requirements of the
applications and so on. Is this really a case, John Maxwell, where we are getting more and
paying less?
Maxwell: Absolutely. Just as the cost per gigabyte has gone down over the past decade, the
effectiveness of the software and what it can do is way beyond what we had 10 years ago.

6. Simplified process
Today, in a virtual environment, we can provide a solution that simplifies the process, where
one person can ensure that hundreds of VMs are protected. They can literally right-click and
restore a VM, a file, a directory, or an application.
One of the focuses we have had at Quest, as I alluded earlier, is that there are a lot of mission-
critical apps running on these machines. Jerome talked about email. A lot of people consider
email one of their most mission-critical applications. And the person responsible for protecting
the environment that Microsoft Exchange is running on, may not be an Exchange administrator,
but maybe they're tasked with being able to recover Exchange.
That’s why we've developed technologies that allow you to go out there, and from that one image
backup, restore an email conversation or an attachment email from someone’s mailbox. That
person doesn’t have to be a guru with Exchange. Our job is to, behind the scenes, figure how to
do this and make this available via a couple of mouse-clicks.
Gardner: So we're moving the administration app’s direction up, rather than app by app, server
by server. We're really looking at it as the function of what you want to do with that data. That
strikes me as a big deal. Is that a whole new thing that we're doing with data, Jerome?
Wendt: Yes, it is. As John was speaking, I was going to comment. I spoke to a Quest customer
just a few weeks ago. He clearly had some very specific technical skills, but he's responsible for
a lot of things, a lot of different functions -- server admin, storage admin, backup admin.
I think a lot of individuals can relate to this guy. I know I certainly did, because that was my role
for many years, when I was an administrator in the police department. You have to try to juggle
everything, while you're trying to do your job, with backup just being one of those tasks.
In his particular case, he was called upon to do a recovery, and, to John’s point, it was an
Exchange recovery. He never had any special training in Exchange recovery, but it just happened
that he had Quest Software in place. He was able to use its FastRecover product to recover his
Exchange Server and had it back up and going in a few hours.
What was really amazing, in this particular case, is that he was traveling at the time it happened.
So he had to talk to his manager through the process, and was able to get it up and going. Once
he had the system up, he was able to log on and get it going fairly quickly.
That just illustrates how much the world has changed and how much backup software and these
products have evolved to the point where you need to understand your environment, probably
more than you need to understand the product, and just find the right product for your
environment. In this case, this individual clearly accomplished that.
Gardner: It sounds like you're moving more to be an architect than a carpenter, right?

7. Wendt: Exactly.
Gardner: So we understand that management is great and oversight at that higher abstraction is
going to get us a lot of benefits. But we mentioned earlier that some folks are at 20 percent
virtualization, while others are at 90 percent. Some data is mission-critical, while other doesn't
require the same diligence, and that's going to vary from company to company.
Hybrid model
So my question to you, John Maxwell, is how do organizations approach this being in a hybrid
sort of a model, between physical and virtual, and recognizing that different apps have different
criticality for their data, and that might change. How do we manage the change? How do we get
from the old way of doing this into these newer benefits?
Maxwell: Well, there are two points. One, we can't have a bunch of niche tools, one for virtual,
one for physical, and the like. That's why, with our vRanger product, which has been the market
leader in virtual data protection for the past seven years, we're coming out with physical support
in that product in the fall of 2012. Those customers are saying, "I want one product that handles
that non-virtualized data."
The second part gets down to what percentage of your data is mission-critical and how complex
it is, meaning is it email, or a database, or just a flat file, and then asking if these different types
of data have specific service-level agreements (SLAs), and if you have products that can deliver
on those SLAs.
That's why at Quest, we're really promoting a holistic approach to data protection that spans
replication, continuous data protection, and more traditional backup, but backup mainly based on
snapshots.
Then, that can map to the service level, to your business requirements. I just saw some data from
an industry analyst that showed the replication software market is basically the same size now as
the backup software market. That shows the desire for people to have kind of that real-time
failover for some application, and you get that with replication.
When it comes to the example that Jerome gave with that customer, the Quest product that we're
using is NetVault FastRecover, which is a continuous data protection product. It backs up
everything in real-time. So you can go back to any point in time.
It’s almost like a time machine, when it comes to putting back that mailbox, the SQL database, or
Oracle database. Yet, it's masking a lot of the complexity. So the person restoring it may not be a
DBA. They're going to be that jack of all trades who's responsible for the storage and maybe
backup overall.

8. Gardner: Jerome, what are you seeing in the field? Are there folks that are saying, "Okay, the
value here is so compelling and we have such a mess, we're going to bite the bullet and just go
totally virtual in three to sixth months. And, at least for our mission-critical apps, we're going to
move them over into this data lifecycle approach for our recovery, backup, and DR?"
Or are you seeing companies that are saying, "Well, this is a five year plan and we're going to do
this first and we are going to kind of string it out?" Which of these seems to be in vogue at the
moment? What works, a bite the bullet, all or nothing, or the slow crawl-walk-run approach?
Wendt: It really depends on the size of the organization you're talking about. When I talk to
small and medium size businesses (SMBs), 500-1,000 employees or fewer, they may have 100
terabyte of storage and may have 200 servers. I see them just biting the bullet. They're doing the
three- to six-month approach. Let's make the conversion, do the complete switchover, and go
virtual as much as possible.
Few legacy systems
Almost all of them have a few legacy systems. They may be running some application on
Windows 2000 Server or some old version of AIX. Who knows what a lot of companies have
running in the background? They can't just virtualize everything, but where they can, they get to
a 98 percent virtualized environment.
When you start getting to enterprises, I see it a little bit different. It's more of a staged approach,
because it just takes more coordination across the enterprise to make it all happen. There are a lot
more logistics and planning going on.
I haven’t talked to too many that have taken five years to do it. It's mostly two to maybe four
years at the outside range. But the move is to virtualize as much as possible, except for those
legacy apps, which for some reason they can't tackle.
Gardner: John Maxwell, for those two classes of user, what does Quest suggest? Is there a path
that you have for those who want to do it as rapidly as possible? And then is that metered
approach also there in terms of how you support the journey?
Maxwell: It's funny that you mention the difference between SMB and the enterprise. I'm a firm
believer that one size doesn’t fit all, which is why we have solutions for specific markets. We
have solutions for the SMB along with enterprise solutions, but we do have a lot of commonality
between the products. We're even developing for our SMB product a seamless upgrade path to
our enterprise-class product.
Again, they're different markets, just as Jerome said. We found exactly what he just mentioned,
which is the smaller accounts tend to be more homogenous and they tend to virtualize a lot more,
whereas in the enterprise they're more heterogeneous and they may have a bigger mix of physical
and virtual.

9. And they may have really more complex systems. That’s where you run into big data and more
complex challenges, when it comes to how you can back data up and how you can recover it.
And there are also different price points.
So our approach is to have solution specific to the SMB and specific to the enterprise. There is a
lot of cross-functionality that exists in the products, but we're very crisp in our positioning, our
go-to-market strategy, the price points, and the features, because one of the things you don’t want
to do with SMB customers is overwhelm them.
I meet hundreds of customers a year, and one of our top customers has an exabyte of data.
Jerome, I don’t know if you talk to many customers that have exabyte, but I don’t really run into
a lot of customers that have an exabyte of data. Their requirements are completely different than
our average vRanger customer, who has around five terabytes of data.
We have products that are specific to the market segments, to specification or non-specification
of that user, and at the price point. Yet, it's one vendor, one throat to choke, and there are paths
for upgrade if you need to.
Gardner: John, in talking with Quest folks, I've heard them refer to a next-generation platform
or approach, or a whole greater than the sum of the parts. How do you define next generation
when it comes to data recovery in your view of the world?
New benefits
Maxwell: Well, without hyperbole, for us, our next generation is a new platform that we call
NetVault Extended Architecture, and this is a way to provide several benefits to our customers.
One is that with NetVault Extended Architecture we now are delivering a single user experience
across products. So this gets into SMB-versus-enterprise for a customer that’s using maybe one
of our point solutions for application or database recovery, providing that consistent look and
feel, consistent approach. We have some customers that use multiple products. So with this, they
now have a single pane of glass.
Also, it's just I think important to offer a consistent means for administering and managing the
backup and recovery process, because as we've been talking, why should a person have to have
multiple skill sets? If you have one view, one console into data protection, that’s going to make
your life a lot easier than have to learn a bunch of other types of solutions.
That’s the immediate benefit that I think people see. What NetVault Extended Architecture
encompasses under the covers, though, is a really different approach in the industry, which is
modularization of a lot of the components to backup and recovery and making them plug and
play.
Let me give you an example. With the increase in virtualization a lot of people just equate
virtualization with VMware. Well, we've got Hyper-V. We have initiatives from Red Hat. We

10. have Xen, Oracle, and others. Jerome, I'm kind of curious about your views, but just as we saw
in the 90s and in the 00s, with people having multiple platforms, whether it's Windows and
Linux or Windows and Linux and, as you said, AIX, I believe we are going to start seeing
multiple hypervisors.
So one of the approaches that NetVault Extended Architecture is going to bring us is a capability
to offer a consistent approach to multiple hypervisors, meaning it could be a combination of
VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V and maybe even KVM from Red Hat.
But, again, the administrator, the person who is managing the backup and recovery, doesn’t have
to know any one of those platforms. That’s all hidden from them. In fact, if they want to restore
data from one of those hypervisors, say restore a VMware as VMDK, which is their volume in
VMware speak, into what's called a VHD and a Hyper-V, they could do that.
That, to me, is really exciting, because this is exploiting these new platforms and environments
and providing tools that simplify the process. But that’s going to be one of the many benefits of
our new NetVault Extended Architecture next generation, where we can provide that singular
experience for our customer base to have a faster go-to-market, faster time to market, with new
solutions, and be able to deliver in a modular approach.
Customers can choose what they need, whether they're an SMB customer, or one of the largest
customers that we have with hundreds of petabytes or exabytes of data.
Wendt: I'd like to elaborate on what John just said. I'm really glad to hear that’s where Quest is
going, John, I haven’t had a chance to discuss this with you guys, but DCIG has a lot of
conversations with managed-service providers, and you'd be surprised, but there are actually very
few that are VMware shops. I find the vast majority are actually either Microsoft Hyper-V or
using Red Hat Linux as their platform, because they're looking for a cost-effective way to deliver
virtualization in their environments.
We've seen this huge growth in replication, and people want to implement disaster recovery
plans or business continuity planning. I think this ability to recover across different hypervisors
is going to become absolutely critical, maybe not today or tomorrow, but I would say in the new
few years. People are going to say, "Okay, now that we've got our environment virtualized, we
can recover locally, but how about recovering into the cloud or with a cloud service provider?
What options do we have there?"
More choice
If they're using VMware and their provider isn’t, they're almost forced to use VMware or
something like this, whereas your platform gives them much more choice for managed service
providers that are using platforms other than VMware. It sounds like Quest will really give them
the ability to backup VMware hypervisors and then potentially recover into Red Hat or Microsoft
Hyper-V at MSPs. So that could be a really exciting development for Quest in that area.

11. Gardner: So being able to support the complexity and the heterogeneity, whether it's at the
application level, the platform level, the VM, and hypervisor level, all of that is part and parcel of
extracting data recovery to the manage and architected level.
Do we have any examples, John, of companies that are already doing that? Are you are familiar
with organizations -- maybe you can name them -- that are doing just that, managing a
heterogeneity issue and coming up with some metrics of success for their data recovery and data
management and lifecycle approach, as a result?
Maxwell: I'd like to give you an example of one customer, one of our European customers called
CMC Markets. They use our entire NetVault family of products, both the core NetVault Backup
product and the NetVault FastRecover product that Jerome mentioned.
They are a company where data is their lifeblood. They're an options trading company. They
process tens of thousands of transactions a day. They have a distributed environment. They have
their main data center in London, and that’s where their network operations center is. Yet, they
have eight offices around the world.
One of the challenges of having remote data and/or big data is whether you can really use
traditional backup to do it. And the answer is no. With big data, there's no way that you will have
enough time in a day to make that happen. With remote data, you want to put something that’s
manual out in that remote office, where you're not going to have IT people.
CMC Markets has come to this approach of move data smarter, versus harder. They've
implemented our NetVault FastRecover product, where it’s backed up to disk at their remote
sites. Then, the product automatically replicates its backups to the home office in London.
Then, for some of their more mission-critical data in the London data center, databases such as
SQL Server and Oracle, they do real-time backup. So they're able to recover the data at any point
in time, literally within seconds. We have 17 patents on this product, most of them around a
feature we call Flash Restore, that allows you to get an application up and running in less than 30
seconds.
But the real-life example is pretty interesting in that, one of their remote offices is in Tokyo. If
you go back to March 11, 2011, when the 9.+ earthquakes happened, the tsunami, they lost
power. They had damage to some of their server racks.
Since they were replicating in London and those backups were done locally in Tokyo, they
actually got their employees up and running using Terminal Server, which enables the Tokyo
employees to connect to the applications that had been recovered in London, because they had
copies of those backups. So there was no disruption to their business.

12. Second problem
And, as luck will have it, two weeks later, they had a problem at one of the other remote offices,
where a server crashed, and then they were able to bring up data remotely. Then, they had
another instance, where they had to just recover data. Because it was so quick, end-users didn’t
even know that disk drive had crashed.
So I think that's a really neat example of a customer who is exploiting today’s technology. This
gets back to the discussion we had earlier about service levels and managing of service levels in
the business and making sure there's not a disruption of the business. If you're doing real-time
trades in a stock exchange type of environment, you can't suffer any outages, because there's not
only the monetary problems, but you don’t want to be in the cover of BBC.com.
Gardner: Of course regulation and compliance issues to consider.
Maxwell: Absolutely.
Gardner: We're getting towards the end of our time. Jerome, quickly, do you have any use cases
or examples that you're familiar with that illustrate this concept of next-generation and lifecycle
approach to data recovery that we have been discussing?
Wendt: Well, it’s not an example, just a general trend I am seeing in products, because most of
DCIG’s focus is just on analyzing the products themselves and comparing, traversing, and
identifying general broader trends within those products.
There are two things we're seeing. One, we're struggling calling backup software backup
software anymore, because it does so much more than that. You mentioned earlier about so much
more intelligence in these products. We call it backup software, because that’s the context in
which everyone understands it, but I think going forward, the industry is probably going to have
to find a better way to refer to these products. Quest is a whole lot more than just running a
backup.
And then second, people, as they view backup and how they manage their infrastructure, really
have to go from this reactive, "Okay, today I am going to have to troubleshoot 15 backup jobs
that failed overnight." Those days are over. And if they're not over, you need to be looking for
new products that will get you over that hump, because you should no longer be troubleshooting
failed backup jobs.
You should be really looking more towards, how you can make sure all your environment is
protected, recoverable, and really moving to the next phase of doing disaster recoveries and
business continuity planning. The products are there. They are mature and people should be
moving down that path.

13. Gardner: Jerome, we mentioned at the outset, mobile and the desire to deliver more data and
applications to edge devices, and of course cloud was mentioned. People are going to be looking
to take advantage of cloud efficiencies internally, but then also look to mixed-sourcing
opportunities, hybrid-computing opportunities, different apps from different places, and the data
lifecycle and backup that needs to be part and parcel with that.
We also mentioned the fact that big data is more important and that the timeframe of getting
mission-critical data to the right people is shortening all the time. This all pulls together, for me,
this notion that in the future you're not going to be able to do this any other way. This is not a
luxury, but a necessity. Is that fair, Jerome?
Wendt: Yes, it is. That’s a fair assessment.
Crystal ball
Gardner: John, the same question to you basically. When we look into the crystal ball, even not
that far out, it just seems that in order to manage what you need to do as a business, getting good
control over your data, being able to ensure that it’s going to be available anytime, anywhere,
regardless of the circumstances is, again, not a luxury, it’s not a nice to have. It’s really just going
to support the viability of the business.
Maxwell: Absolutely. And what’s going to make it even more complex is going to be the cloud,
because what's your control, as a business, over data that is hosted some place else?
I know that at Quest we use seven SaaS-based applications from various vendors, but what’s our
guarantee that our data is protected there? I can tell you that a lot of these SaaS-based companies
or hosting companies may offer an environment that says, "We're always up," or "We have a
higher level of availability," but most recovery is based on logical corruption of data.
As I said, with some of these smaller vendors, you wonder about what if they went out of
business, because I have heard stories of small service providers closing the doors, and you say,
"But my data is there."
So the cloud is really exciting, in that we're looking at how we're going to protect assets that may
be off-premise to your environment and how we can ensure that you can recover that data, in
case that provider is not available.
Then there's something that Jerome touched upon, which is that the cloud is going to offer so
many opportunities, the one that I am most excited about is using the cloud for failover. That
really getting beyond recovery into business continuity.
And something that has only been afforded by the largest enterprises, Global 1000 type
customers, is the ability to have a stand up center, a SunGard or someone like that, which is very
costly and not within reach of most customers. But with virtualization and with the cloud, there's
a concept that I think we're going to see become very mainstream over the next five years, which

14. is failover recovery to the cloud. That's something that’s going to be within reach of even SMB
customers, and that’s really more of a business continuity message.
So now we're stepping up even more. We're now saying, "Not only can we recover your data
within seconds, but we can get your business back up and running, from an IT perspective, faster
than you probably ever presumed that you could."
Gardner: That sounds like a good topic for another day. I am afraid we are going to have to
leave it there.
You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on the value around
next-generation, integrated and simplified approaches to fast backup and recovery. We have seen
how a comprehensive approach to data recovery bridges legacy and new data, scales to handle
big data, and provides automation and governance across the essential functions of backup,
protection, and disaster recovery.
I'd like to thank our guests. We've been joined by John Maxwell, the Vice President of Product
Management for Data Protection at Quest Software. Thanks so much, John.
Maxwell: Thank you.
Gardner: We've also been joined by Jerome Wendt. He is the President and Lead Analyst at
DCIG, an independent storage analyst and consulting firm. Thanks so much, Jerome.
Wendt: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again to you,
our audience, for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Quest Software
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingDirect podcast on how data-recovery products can provide
quicker access to data and analysis. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights
reserved.
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