Post by Al Perlman
We have reached the end of the line for the latest series of events sponsored by Quantum and titled Virtualization, Cloud and the New Realities for Data Protection. In all, the series covered 15 cities and reached more than 300 IT and storage leaders in a broad range of industries across the United States. There was a consistent focus on several key themes, including modernizing data protection, managing costs and protecting data based on its value to the organization. There were also many conversations about how to achieve confidence and security in cloud-based deployments.
Now that the series is over, we asked Greg Schulz, founder and senior advisor at The Server and StorageIO Group (StorageIO) to share with us his impressions of the key concerns expressed by users during the 15-city tour. Schulz was the keynote speaker at each of the events and was an active participant in all of the discussions. Here are his five most compelling takeaways from the event series:
- Avoid treating everything the same. That includes applications, data, what you are protecting for or against as well as how you use technologies.
- Don’t be scared of clouds and virtualization. Do your homework, listen and learn, identify your concerns and determine how to address them.
- Leverage data footprint reduction (DFR) techniques. These include archiving, compression, deduplication and deploying state-of-the-art data management techniques and technologies across all applications using tools and techniques applicable to the task at hand.
- Stretch your budget and staff resources to do more: The best way to achieve this is by rethinking why you are protecting data and applications, when, how often, for how long and with what. By taking this type of strategic approach to data protection in the cloud, you can achieve savings in some areas and reinvest in your infrastructure to support continued growth and improvements.
- Maximize your return on innovation (the new ROI): You can achieve this by leveraging different technologies in various ways to find problems, remove complexity and thus reduce the cost of doing things. Again, if you can reduce the cost of doing things, you can dedicate more resources to deal with data growth, which is an absolute inevitability.
The other important point that was often reiterated during the event series was the strength and commitment of Quantum to helping customers deal with the new realities of data protection in virtualized and cloud environments. Quantum executives were able to point to specific case studies where Quantum technology solutions have been able to achieve huge improvements for customers: For example, how Bend Memorial Clinic has achieved a four-fold improvement in IT productivity while making the backup process six times faster – and reducing the time required to do restores from days to minutes. And how Xerox was able to capitalize on a massive new market opportunity enabled by the cloud.
Quantum’s commitment to supporting customers with data protection in the cloud was further reiterated by the company’s actions during the event series, including the introduction of Q-Cloud, which sets a new price point for delivering business-class cloud-based backup and recovery solutions. Event participants were particularly enthused and impressed by the introduction of Q-Cloud and how it will enable them save to money and improve performance of data protection in their virtualized and cloud environments.
So there you have it. Please take the time to review all of our posts covering this event series, particularly if you are finding challenges in dealing with the new realities of data protection in this rapidly changing environment. And, if you want more information about how you can achieve greater success – and confidence – in backup and recovery in virtualized and cloud environments, please make sure to follow up with Quantum. See you next time.
