In their ongoing coverage of Oracle Open World 2013, John Furrier and Dave Vellante spoke with Guy Churchward, EMC President of Backup Recovery Systems and Stephen Manley, CTO EMC Backup Recovery Systems in theCUBE. The three discuss EMC’s journey to delivering effective protection storage architecture, what their solutions mean to Oracle customers, and the importance of metadata.

Churchward finds the acceleration of interest in backup recovery and data management impressive. He has been surprised by the speed at which the transition from data center consolidation into service provision and cloud continues to take off. Manley notes that as data grew, the old traditional model could not scale. Looking at the data just to get a copy of it has gotten expensive.

Manley notes that transforming backup in IT as a service involves three key components. First, clients need the right protection storage. For a long time tape was taken for granted as the right protection storage. Now, Manley notes ,de-duplicated disk is the standard; companies must find the right de-duplicated disk for their needs. Second, Manley says its essential to “plug in with the sources of the data to get the intelligence they offer,” including flow and control. Third, data management services are needed to tie everything together. According to Manley, “Regardless of how you are protecting the data, your backup team needs that visibility.”

For Oracle customers, EMC solutions transform back–up strategies. Manley notes that there was tension between DBAs who were frustrated with backup teams because they didn’t have access to visibility. He describes the frustration as, ‘The backup guys keep telling me that they’ve protected my data, that its safe and that I can trust them. If they were smarter, they’d have been DBAs.” Now, however, EMC BRS provides visibility into data with no more black box. Manley adds, “The DBA gets to do their own backups and run their own recoveries. Oracle continues to move that bar forward by letting the DBA have a little protection [and] performance capabilities.”

Referencing another Oracle Open World presenter, Churchward notes that it is also important to centralize data, contextualize it and understand how to drill it. The more you centralize data, the easier it is to get efficiencies from it, either driving it from a de-duplication standpoint or data analytics. Still, citing Oracle’s red stack as an example, Churchward describes a corresponding challenge as, “It works perfectly if your organization is exclusively red. But, organizations aren’t that, they’re heterogeneous. [If] you go all the way down their stack, you end up with fragmentation, and this creates an accidental architecture.” As a result, clients end up with pockets of data in multiple places, leading to increased de-duplications and cost. Security also becomes an issue because when data fragmentation rises, points of potential attack also increases.

What most people overlook in terms of value to be extracted from data is what Manley considers the “crown jewel”: metadata. Understanding the context of your information, no matter how you’re storing it, is imperative. According to Manley, “If you can have that one common metatdata lake so you can know what you need to stitch together when you need to stitch it together” companies can truly leverage data for business value.