Jason Buffington, Senior Analyst with ESG, agreed to talk to Dave Vellante and John Furrier in theCUBE, covering a wide range of topics, from the new IBM Pulse event.

They all noticed that “these tech shows have become more and more like Vegas shows,” resembling true Broadway productions.

As an analyst focusing on data back-up, Buffington confessed to enjoying the show: “I like the Pulse because there’s enough data protection in it to keep things interesting for me. The fact that you can’t go anywhere without talking about the cloud is nothing but goodness.”

“What’s new in the data protection world?” asked Vellante. “What are some of the things that have been exciting you?”

The data protection spectrum

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“Lately, one of the things that I’ve been passionate about was helping people understand the ‘data protection spectrum’,” Buffington started. “Data protection ought to be thought of as an umbrella term, with things like back-up, snapshot, replication, archive and availability. Those are all like colors of a rainbow.”

“What you ought to be thinking about when you’re thinking about data protection strategy is when was the last time you saw a rainbow without the color green; or blue… Your data protection strategy should include that whole range of solutions out there,” explained Buffington. “People are finally starting to realize that the hybrid approach – those mechanisms for data protection – should also be thought of in the context of disk + tape + cloud. Today’s data protection should have all options on the table.”

“There’s always been a large spectrum of back-up,” added Vellante. “That’s not changing. If anything, it’s getting more diverse.”

Buffington agreed: “We saw folks predicting everything was going to go disk and tape is still in use in a little over half of our environments today. Some of the new innovations we see around tape durability and flexibility – things like LTFS. I expect tape to actually get more bump.”

“One of the pieces of research I’ve recently looked at was around the convergence of back-up and archive,” Buffington went on. “People used to say that back-up was the disk and archive was the tape, and we don’t see that as much anymore. These are some interesting things: we asked folks what they were actually archiving. I expected to hear ‘I’m storing data for 7-10-15 years’ but that’s actually not true. The average of data coming back up from the archive is under 24 months. The average size of data coming up is a Gb or less,” detailed Buffington.

“What is the domain of tape then?” asked Vellante. “There are some economical advantages to tape, if you can find the right use-case.”

“I like the deep archive, but today’s traditional data protection in the robo type environments, tape is an adequate solution for some of those distributed environments as well where they can’t afford deduplicated disks,” said Buffington. “Fifteen years ago we wanted better backup than tape could give us, so we wanted to go to disk. But we didn’t know how to write to disk, so we made disk look like tape, and that’s how we got VTL. Fast-forwards 15 years, tape has some new legs to stand on, but we don’t know how to write to tape anymore, so now we put LTFS on it to make it look more like disk.”

Buffington had some valid points: the disk is not the ‘be-all, end-all’ silver bullet of data protection, tape is not entirely dead, and cloud has a place.

Cloud has a place and time

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“From a cloud perspective, there are a lot of people out there that think that cloud is the silver bullet. That is not true,” said Buffington. “For the back-up problem to go away it is not around Cloud as a back-up Service, it’s around the expertise and the consultancy coming in to actually take over the management of it. For most cloud-based data protection solutions, you’re still going to run it. Cloud-based data protection just becomes the mechanism by which you deploy it, nothing else really changes. The cloud is just a deployment model that says that we believe we can do things more efficiently because we’re doing it at scale and we have deep expertise.”

At the invitation of theCUBE co-hosts, Buffington nominated what he is really excited about regarding IBM: the operation center and the new UI.

In Buffington’s opinion, 2013 was the year when IBM said ‘this is not your daddy’s back-up’. “They have the whole spectrum of data backup, they do it across disk, tape and cloud and they do it across X86 and other platforms as well. A lot of people forget the breadth of that solution set.”

• Advice to IT pros

“The data protection spectrum does not have to be a complicated set of autonomous components. There’s a lot of great software solutions out there that do let you do replication + snapshot management + back-up in a single UI, to a single data store, from a single administrator’s point of view,” said Buffington.