Collecting data is one thing; protecting it is another. Backup and recovery systems are a necessary part of any IT infrastructure. Even so, no one likes it. Backup is slow, complex and often expensive. Recovery can be confusing and bloat up a system with copies and old data that has no value. This is changing. New tools are entering the market designed around simplicity and reliability.

To gain some insight into the next generation of backup tools, John Furrier (@furrier), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke to Stephen Aldous, product manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), and Gagan Bhatia, product marketing manager at HPE, during the VMworld 2016 conference in Las Vegas.

Software-defined solutions

The conversation opened up as Aldous laid out the value proposition of HPE’s latest tools. Software-defined everything is the way forward — things like hyper-converged platforms that pull together services and networking all in one piece, he said.

“Customers are expecting easy-to-use solutions now,” Aldous stated.

Aldous explained how customers want something that’s plug and play so they can get up and running quickly. They want to run their business instead of focusing on infrastructure. Delivering this platform in a consumable way allows the customers to derive more value from their IT departments.

New tools for the tech

The product of this philosophy is a package called HPE VM Explorer, a virtual machine backup and replication for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Bhatia spoke about how backup and recovery are still complex and hard to manage. VM Explorer can cover both physical and virtual environments, plus it combines with some of HPE’s analytics, he said. He added the analytics run at every step to determine the value of the data.

In the lower end of the market, companies don’t have IT specialists, Aldous said. They want products that just work. VM Explorer is point and click, system reports are emailed and it’s easy to set up. Bhatia joined in, saying backup has to work, but customers want to focus on their core business.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE