Scale is both a blessing and a curse. On the good side, scaling allows a business to collect more data, do more processing, and recover more insights from their information. The downside is that data must be protected. When faced with exponential data growth, traditional techniques aren’t on the table anymore. Increasingly, businesses must consider carefully their recovery and security options.

To shed some light on this problem, John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, went to the HPE Discover 2016 conference in Las Vegas. There, they joined Patrick Osborne, senior director of Product Management at HPE Storage, and Craig Gleason, storage architect at Tektronix.

New tech, new ways

The conversation started with a look at the changes in the data protection field. Gleason pointed out the biggest change from his perspective was the move to the Cloud and making sure the data is safe there. Osborne offered his view from the storage side, concerning the all-flash and software-defined datacenter.

Osborne continued, mentioning announcements on new media and new capabilities for storage technology. He also said HPE Storage is investing in product development and good experiences for their customers.

The dark side of scale

“Customers are struggling with large database backups, across the board,” Osborne said. He described how, for a lot of customers, their databases are getting huge. The database needs to perform, but the company also needs to back it up, he continued. At that scale, traditional techniques are hard.

Backup is becoming a pivot point, Osborne said. He outlined how other use cases, like copying and database management, were becoming part of the backup technology portfolio. Gleason added that these new capabilities can streamline the operation. As technology improves, we can limit our exposure to data loss during recovery.

“It’s bringing data protection to the forefront,” Osborne said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE