The Cube – VMworld 2012 – Jason Buffington, ESG, with Dave Vellante

We were able to catch up with Jason Buffington, ESG Senior Analyst at VMWorld 2012 when he joined Wikibon founder Dave Vellante in TheCube. Buffington was asked about what he found most interesting, from a data protection standpoint.

One of Buffington’s favorites was the introduction of VDP, a built-in data protective product. VMware has gone through some serious transitions with products such as VCB, VADP and VDR, which according to Dave Vellante, was a “good effort but just didn’t really get there.”

Another hot topic that was heavily touched on was back-up and how important it is to have a secure back-up system. Buffington said that data duplication (D-dupe) “is a must” because backing up to a disk is nonviable without D-dupe when dealing with virtualized environments.

Back-up is no new topic to Buffington, who has been a veteran to it for 22 years.

“Back-up was always like a religion…once you signed up for it, you were in it for life,” he said.

Buffington was part of a modernization project in which five different vectors on how people are looking to change their data protection strategies and why. These changes the people are looking to get are: D-dupe, better use for hardware for snap shooting, array-based replication and what they are doing now with the cloud.

50% of the responded base for the survey have had back up for three years or under because virtualization caused people to rethink their solution. Interestingly enough, when the people were asked if they had the ability to start from scratch and erase everything, only 32% of the people said that they would keep what they had. Only 18% said they would go to the cloud.

And as far as Buffington is concerned, cloud is still on the rise.

“I don’t see private cloud as a service,” he said “I want to see data protection as an attribute of a private cloud offering.”

Check out the entire interview here.