Greg White is a Senior Manager of Product Marketing, focusing on Data Management and Protection. He has worked in in the technology industry in brand and product marketing for the last decade helping organizations of all sizes, verticals and geographies solve their IT challenges. Over the last six years, Greg has gained specific knowledge and experience in the enterprise application and storage areas where he has helped businesses find solutions for their data growth, data management, and data protection problems.

Jeff Dorr is a Senior Manager currently focused on data protection product marketing for CommVault. Over the past 10 years, Jeff has led efforts in several companies to develop, introduce, and manage market leading hardware, software, and services that really help users improve their data protection environment.

Modern Data Management and Virtual Server Protection: It's All in the Details

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Guest post by Liem Nguyen

In the 9th grade I took a research class from Mrs. Miske at Grand Rapids City Middle-High School, who taught me about the importance of details. "Do not be va-GUE," she'd say, adding a second syllable to the word "vague" as a precaution against being it. I remembered her big square glasses were either pushed up on her hair or sliding down her nose as she lectured: we had to be specific about the words we chose to say or write, because good research started with solid facts and details. So with some important events happening in storage recently (Dell's Quest, EMC Networker 8 launch), I decided to do a little research on what CommVault means by "modern data management" and "modern data protection."

While in Oceanport last week, I sat down for a whiteboard session with Phil Curran, senior product marketing manager for virtual server solutions, to understand some of these details. He came armed with blue and red grease markers and I a camcorder. Our chat resulted in a few video clips that I'll post in the next couple weeks, starting here with the basics of modern data management and virtual server protection.

In the first clip, Phil talks about how new challenges in areas like virtualization, big data and mobile access, are converging and having tremendous impact in storage and data management. This requires re-thinking the approach — enabling IT to "get in and get out fast" when backing up and protecting data and converging backup with archiving and reporting capabilities.

In the second clip on virtualization, Phil contrasts protecting virtual machines (VM) with and without agents across storage tiers—the difference, among other things, matters. Some solutions implement agents inside every guest VM. CommVault does not and instead leverages an independent CommServe media agent server to offload performance and administrative overhead, which allow the hosts to focus on delivering applications and services. These are good overviews on the Simpana 9 platform and CommVault's Solving Forward philosophy on protecting, managing and accessing data in any world, virtual or physical.

Come back for parts 2 and 3 where Phil will discuss the integration and convergence of backup with dedupe, hardware snapshot management, searchable catalogs and archiving. Hopefully you'll see where the details differentiate the modern data management approach from the traditional one. Maybe they will provide ideas on how to evaluate these approaches and spark some questions to ask your current vendor or integration partner. Just make sure your partner isn't va-gue about the answers.

Liem Nguyen is senior director of global corporate communications for CommVault.

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