Industry analysts bring a ton of value to the technology marketplace. With so many different vendors, CommVault included, trying to get their message to customers, analysts can be a HUGE help in navigating the noise. The key for users and evaluators is to understand the landscape of different analyst content and to view that content through the appropriate lens. Unfortunately, it's not totally clear cut - as evidenced by the fact that some of our competitors have even been confused as to the source of analyst material. In the data management and data protection market, all of the major vendors, including CommVault, Symantec, EMC, etc. leverage both sponsored analyst assets and objective analyst reports to talk about our solutions.

So another fast-paced, fun and informative VMware Partner Exchange event is in the books. The curtain has come down and the lights are dimmed. It was great catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. Lots of discussion, ideation, and even some bloviation.

But I generally savor a moment to reflect on what I heard, saw and learned. And I'd like to share my own thoughts from the meetings, presentations and discussions I was part of. So sit back, relax and enjoy.

Frankly, we, at CommVault, are flattered and more than a little bit excited that the technology world continues to validate our strategy of innovation in data management. CommVault has worked tirelessly to keep pushing the market forward by expanding beyond the world of the "simple" backup. Based on the publishing of the most recent, independently-developed DCIG Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide, the folks at DCIG are among the growing crowd that understands and support's CommVault's vision of next generation data management.

The rise of cloud computing is undoubtedly upon us. I will not lend myself to the chorus declaring - once again - 2013 to be the year of the cloud. But I will offer that this year is already shaping up to be an exciting one for many of us involved in bringing to market solutions for cloud-based infrastructure. At CommVault we're expecting a truly monumental year when it comes to delivering industry leading data management solutions built for emerging shared services infrastructures. We know that as the number of organizations looking to build out thousands of VMs continues to grow, the ability to work well with private cloud providers like Rackspace to provide shared services infrastructures is becoming increasingly important.

Many times in a virtualized data center, data protection and management are an afterthought, addressed with limited purpose-built external tools that lead to sub-optimal results and poor resource utilization. The critical and even more complex task of data management with virtual machines - including protection, recovery and long term retention - in a densely populated data center with multiple applications needs a more integrated and flexible approach.

It's that time of year again. Hurricanes continue to churn in the Gulf of Mexico - threatening to blast another big city US city. Wildfires blaze out of control on the west coast and in Colorado. Meanwhile, typhoon season in the Far East is peaking for another year. And we seem to be seeing even more frequent incidences of earthquakes - you can even look it up on the USGS website. These disasters certainly make you pause for a second and ask a few basic questions about preparedness. Does your business have a plan in case the unthinkable does occur? How do you manage through it and recover quickly? These are all critical questions to be asking.

Here's an operational view into what is happening on VMs when a backup operation kicks off. Most VMware backup solutions that leverage VMware's vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) are going to drive a process that looks very similar to this example. Before the backup operation can begin, the running VM and any applications running therein are quiesced so the backup application can generate an application consistent copy. Many backup applications that use VADP perform this operation, which essentially freezes the VM image while a backup copy is generated.

Big day at VMworld. Not only did I get some schwag, meet with a bunch of CommVault customers and have a nice turkey sandwich, but I got to meet one of my geek idols. Mr. Data (thank you Brent Spiner).

The prevailing scuttlebutt is a carryover of the week's earlier news. There was a lot of talk about VMware embedding 2TB instances of Avamar in vSphere 5.1 and the potential impact on VMware's partner ecosystem, especially in the SMB space.

I was bummed when Hurricane Irene derailed my planned trip to VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas last year. My hopes of blogging from the event were dashed when I was unable to rebook my flight in time to make the show. This year, however, it's a different story.

Blogging used to be part of my gig. Some of you may recognize the byline from various storage industry publications like SearchStorage, Storage Magazine, InfoStor and Enterprise Storage Forum. Yes, I was once an intrepid industry reporter.

Do you virtualize fearlessly? Are you able to scale to protect thousands of VMs in a single bound? Are you on the path to the cloud? Well VMworld 2012 is right around the corner and, for one week this month, the event promises to make San Francisco the nexus of the virtualization and cloud universe. The CommVault team can't wait to see you there and I want to take a moment to let you know about all the fun and educational activities we have in store to help you on your journey to the cloud. Please come by and see us at booth #1531!

In order to ensure compelling, real-world content is delivered during the breakout sessions at VMworld San Francisco and VMworld Barcelona, VMware is encouraging customers, partners, industry analysts and VMware employees to participate in the content creation process by voting on the proposed presentations on the VMworld website. This is a fantastic and unique approach that VMworld takes to engaging the VMware community so that you get the content you are looking for and hear from the people you want.

CommVault will be at VMworld in full force to provide best practices and insights for managing and protecting large-scale virtual infrastructures and powering private and public cloud infrastructures. As such, we've designed some excellent sessions that I think will change your entire view of managing and protection VMware environments. Below are the CommVault submissions for VMworld 2012. Cast your votes today!

More and more I find myself on customer calls where a client wants to move 50TB or so of data to the cloud. In theory, moving data to the cloud should be straightforward, but in reality there are important issues to consider first. Reality, of course, consists of lots of ones, zeros, and some basic math. I'm no math whiz, so I decided to write this blog to help others like myself calculate the cloud equation. When talking with these clients, I ask the following questions: How much bandwidth do you have? How much data do you have? Do you ever want to restore your data? How long is acceptable for the restore process to take place? Does your cloud provider allow you to seed the cloud (i.e. an option whereby a disk drive or other appliance is sent to customers, who back up their data locally and then ship the drive/appliance back to the provider)? Does your cloud provider have servers in the cloud so you could potentially restore data directly from the cloud storage?

The team here at CommVault is winding up a really cool little project with our friends at NetApp on a new scalable Virtual Infrastructure reference architecture and I want to take a minute to share a couple of the details on the power of this solution. This virtual infrastructure architecture represents a joint CommVault, NetApp and VMware solution that leverages NetApp SnapProtect^® snapshot management technology to deliver optimized data protection for customers and partners looking to quickly build out "IT as a Service" delivery models.

I think that one of the most interesting things about my role at CommVault is that I have the opportunity to work with an exciting variety of cloud companies and can see first-hand all of the new ways they are solving problems. CommVault cloud providers are constantly tackling new markets and one of the hottest trends we are seeing is in the need to protect laptops and desktops for businesses. I've had several companies come to me this year with thousands of users and 100+TB of data to protect. And while they want to protect the data, they don't want to manage it themselves. Often "edge data" goes unprotected and companies just don't have the staff to deal with it internally. The cloud is a perfect fit for non-critical data as it offers a new tier of low-cost storage wrapped with range of data management services.

For those of you who have been running CommVault in a multi-tenant environment, you know that we've made many enhancements over the past five years to specifically address the needs of cloud providers. The latest release of Simpana^® software is no exception. We've been working hard with product management and development to create an easy-to-use portal and API set. Cloud providers want to offer its clients some self-service tasks but don't want to administer many lines of command line code to do it. Now, with CommVault's web console, it's easy to skin the console and make it available as a standalone portal or leverage the API set and integrate it into your own portal.

Our SolveForward 2012 virtual trade show has been a huge success for CommVault. So far, we've had tons of visitors come through the virtual event to chat with our experts about all the new Simpana software capabilities. One of the new features generating a lot of interest is the new vCenter Plug-in for Simpana 9. More than one person swung by the virtualization booth and said "I didn't even know this was possible!" and "This looks like it could save me a bunch of time."

It has been a busy period for the CommVault team across the Asia-Pacific and Japan region, with participation in both vForum events in Sydney and Singapore, as well the VSS event series in the ASEAN region.

CommVault has been a committed partner of the VMware events across the region for several years, but the 2011 events were some of the most successful to date. The VMware showpiece in Sydney set a new standard both in terms of the number and calibre of attendees, with over 550 visiting the CommVault booth during the show. In Singapore, that figure rose to over 600.

After a successful event in Sydney, CommVault is going to vForum Singapore! On November 9th we will be demonstrating the capabilities of CommVault's modern data management and protection products such as our Virtual Server Data Protection and Scalable Virtual Infrastructure implementation. You can follow the #vForumCV hashtag on Twitter for updates about demos and our booth activities during the conference. This is a one-day event and admission is FREE, so don't miss it!

I was lucky enough to be able to attend last week's vForum Sydney conference and had the opportunity to talk virtual server protection with many of our customers and partners. The show was a smashing success and, as a follow up, I thought I'd recap some of the hot topics from vForum and point you to some resources that might help you solve your virtual machine (VM) protection challenges.

While VMworld 2011 Las Vegas is behind us, VMworld 2011 Copenhagen is fast approaching and the CommVault team is hard at work with final preparations for the show. The CommVault team will be in booth #100C and will be showing off the latest CommVault Simpana 9 software capabilities for protecting and managing data in growing VMware environments, including our SnapProtect integration for virtual servers.

CommVault is heading to vForum Sydney! We are looking forward to seeing many of our existing customers and meeting some new friends at the event. From October 19th - 20th, you will find us at booth #5, where we will be showcasing some of our latest products and sharing best practices when implementing modern data management environments.

VMworld Las Vegas 2011 wraps up today and, needless to say, it was great to see so many current and future members of the CommVault family - customers, partners and IT professionals - gathered together around our booth, chatting about virtualization, deduplication, data protection, backup & recovery, and throwing around terms that only those of us in the IT industry can actually use in everyday conversation. Lots of us literally weathered storms to get to the conference, but after four days of sessions and demos we must finally pack up and head home. But first, a quick recap.

Over the past few weeks, CommVault has made several advancements in how we can help customers and partners manage and protect virtual servers:

• We introduced our new service provider program to aid Managed Service Providers (MSPs) in streamlining the deployment and management of cloud services;
• We announced full support for VMware vSphere 5;
• We shared the story of how Richardson International, Canada's largest, privately owned agribusiness, was able to grow its virtual server farm with Simpana software;
• We announced CommVault's new VIRAL program and infrastructure building blocks for VMware resellers;
• We also announced our VMware Application Data Management (ADM) bundle aimed at helping guide small and midsize businesses (SMBs) down the road to virtual stability;
• We revealed the findings of our annual CommVault end user virtualization survey;
• We led a session during VMworld where we discussed Snapshot-based Backups for Virtual Infrastructures;
• In the midst of it all... we held a contest on Twitter to get your feedback on what you would like to learn during our "Customers on CommVault" VMworld booth sessions and gave away an iPad 2!

Back in June, NetApp and Cisco announced that more than 150 customers have implemented infrastructure solutions based on the FlexPod private cloud architecture. Meanwhile, Dell has made some noise about developing virtual infrastructure solutions to simplify the design and deployment of private cloud environments.

The benefits of these approaches are pretty clear in that they can deliver a pre-defined reference architecture that provides predictability in design, deployment and performance of the infrastructure for private cloud deployments. This helps to simplify and accelerate not only the initial deployment but also offers guidelines for scaling out the infrastructure.

In spite of these benefits, we're still seeing a significant data protection and management gap in these solutions. For example, the Enterprise Strategy Group recently reported in its Market Landscape Report that two of the top five Virtualization Spending Initiatives for 2011 include addressing concerns around backup and disaster recovery. This continues to be a challenge for many customers.

Last week, we kicked off @CommVault's #VMworldCV Twitter Contest. We asked you to share what you would like to learn at our "Customers on CommVault" booth sessions during VMworld. We have been thrilled with the response!

Over the last 10 days, we received your tweets with questions about CommVault solutions as well as best practices and applications. We are taking your tweets to VMworld with us and integrating the best of them into our customer booth sessions where our guest hosts will share their experiences with CommVault as well as exchange best practices.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

With the recent launch of vSphere 5, VMware introduced the concept of the "Monster VM." As Andre Leibovici points out in his blog, this "is VMware's ultimate move to help organizations to virtualize business-critical applications." I couldn't agree more. The fourfold increase in supported CPU, memory, network and I/O will go a long way toward enabling customers to deploy larger workloads within a VMware context. Review all the details on vSphere 5 support.

There is little doubt that with support for this type of workload more businesses will consider virtualization as they deploy critical applications going forward. I have heard several people point out that customers are no longer asking "why virtualize?" Instead, they are now asking "Why NOT virtualize?"

CommVault has been working with service providers for many years, but until recently service providers have not been eligible to participate in the PartnerAdvantage program. By opening up the PartnerAdvantage program to our service providers, CommVault seeks to better enable them to deliver higher margin revenue to their clients by expanding their managed services portfolio to small and medium businesses. The program is comprehensive, offering a flexible pay-as-you-grow rental model and providing access to enhanced technical tools and marketing and training support through the InnerVault portal. CommVault service providers have access to the following features, all available as part of the Simpana software platform, the leading data management software:

• Data Protection
• Archive for Space Management
• e-Discovery
• Edge Data Protection
• Remote Office Data Protection
• Cloud API's

The countdown to VMworld, Las Vegas has started. Have you worked out your conference schedule yet? Have you looked into ways of cloning yourself so that you can attend two sessions simultaneously?

We know how hectic VMworld can get, so we decided to create as many opportunities as possible to meet you during the conference. CommVault will not only speak at VMworld but we will also be hosting sessions at our booth (#801) where we will set up four different stations to address specific data management solutions:

1. Virtual Server Data Protection
2. Cloud Enablement
3. Customers on CommVault: Case Studies and Best Practices
4. Scalable Virtual Infrastructure

Last week we kicked off CommVault's #VMworldCV Twitter Contest and requested your feedback for our customer booth sessions. The tweets have started to roll in as many of you have shared what you would like to learn or ask your fellow CommVault customers who will be leading the sessions at our booth during VMworld. Those of you who have participated are also one 140-character tweet closer to winning a brand new iPad!

The contest ends this week! If you haven't sent us a tweet yet, don't miss the opportunity to be a part of our customer booth sessions by telling us what you would like to learn or sharing your questions about virtual server protection or any of our data management solutions. Check out our official contest rules by clicking here. Please help us spread the word by letting your friends and peers know about the contest as well.