Guy Churchward, EMC DPAD President, explained the scope of his division within the storage vendor’s ecosystem, sitting down with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, for a live interview at EMC World 2014. The name for the DPAD division was given by bringing together the data protection side and the availability piece, Churchward explained. The goal was to provide a full spectrum solution in one division, to integrate and provide these technologies to offer a better service to the customers.

“In reality, the organization has to figure out how you center around a gravitational pull. For us this was around data protection,” Churchward explained.

Commenting on RecoveryPoint as part of the division’s portfolio, Churchward said his team is already working “very, very closely with the RecoveryPoint.” His division will have a few groundbreaking announcements toward the end of the year according to Churchward, explaining that. “it made absolute sense to bring [RecoveryPoint] into the family. The same team was really executing against the higher levels of abstraction.”

EMC translates the protection storage architecture and how it relates to consumption models. “We have to provide that full storage for someone on premise, for someone in a hybrid environment, or for someone born in the cloud,” Churchward explained.

Explaining his view on consumption models, Churchward used an analogy to music. The intended music has never changed the song, but the way  we consume it has changed — from live performances to tape, disc, now digital formats. “In exactly the same way, data has this same effect,” Churchward said. “Data is a constant, data grows, but the consumption model changes.”

“I am not a detractor or an advocate of cloud, I basically see it as another consumption model,” Churchward said. “The same way I won’t turn around to say there’s no point in being on the mainframe.”

The customer decides in the end. Using the same music analogy, Churchward said the mainframe is to infrastructure as vinyl is to music formats. It has its unique appeal. “Records have a beautiful purity, but you have to modernize the players, and the interconnect,” he said, adding that vinyl sales were up 58 percent last year, with 6 million vinyl records sold.

When it comes to data protection, the important thing for Churchward is all about meta data. “Just because you’re replicating across, doesn’t mean you know where stuff is.”

Stored data capacities are going up, but people want fast access, so metadata is king. There is a separation from how you store it to how you control it, how you manage it.

Commenting on why this year’s edition of EMC World, Churchward  said, “for me, backup and recovery has always been in the basement,” noting that this perception is now changing.

“What do you do with the meta data, with the information you store, I now have a data store where you can go and drill. The team is maniacally executing against our vision for data protection,” Churchward concluded.