Dave Vellante held a backup panel at VMworld 2011 with three industry insiders, Brad Maltz, CTO at ICI Drew Kramer, VP of technical operations for VMware; and Jerome Wendt, founder and lead analyst at DCIG (video below). They discussed how the cloud is affecting backup, and driving this industry to keep up with the current trends in the enterprise.

Brad started the discussion by stating how virtualization and the consolidation of the datacenter lower the value tape backup has to offer to organizations, and this where deduplication and other emerging come in to supplement it.  Karmer highlighted how dedupe is being leveraged in his own unit, which is responsible for “the care of feeding of VMware’s R&D organization,” as he put it.

Wendt continued by saying that backup can no longer be viewed in traditional ways, considering it’s no longer worth the expense. He also pointed out trend Steve Manley also discussed during his visit to theCube: the administrator that’s also involved in backup.

When the topic of recovery over backup came up, Maltz elaborated on the ‘right’ approach to a restore:

“You almost want your backup and recovery solution to be the final piece of being able to do a restore. You want to have multiple layers in front of that that you can actually do the restore from… you want that backup module to be the final frontier for your company. With that being said, it all depends on what kind of recovery you’re looking for.”

Looking forward, the panel mentioned end user file recovery in virtualized environments as a potential approach to reducing the workload of the backup team, if implemented on a wider scale.

Cloud and increased backup speed, driven by companies reluctant to wait long periods of time, were recognized as the biggest disruptor and trend in the near term by the panel.


Watch live video from SiliconANGLE.com on Justin.tv