It’s sometimes hard for a company the size of EMC to keep up with its smaller and nimbler startup rivals amid the accelerating pace of technological change, but the challenge is worth it, according to the storage stalwart’s head of data protection and availability business, Stephen Manley. In his latest appearance on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, he explains that the market impact of an innovative product can increase several fold when when an established vendor is involved, sometimes even disrupting entire segments.

The industry-wide migration from tape- to disk-based backup stands as the most relevant example, especially since EMC is credited as a driving force behind the transition. Manley tells hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick that, from his company’s point of view, the trend is not so much about replacing one technology with another as it is about enabling a new and more effective approach to protecting enterprise data, an effort that continues to this very day.

“What we’re seeing is not just a one-for-one swap out of everything tape can do to disk but more, there is more value getting pushed into that part of the stack from the point of view of disaster recovery, archival as well as the operational recovery you get out of backup,” he says. ”So it makes sense that the market has gotten bigger because we’re doing more than tape ever could.”

As always, with major technology disruption come changes to the role of the practitioner. Historically, backup administrators spent the bulk of their working hours sorting out last night’s copies and wishing nothing goes wrong during the day, Manley says, but increasing automation and integration are now shifting the focus to delivering business value.

“As we move more and more of the protection flow into the infrastructure, what we’ve done with the VMware integration, what we’ve done with integration like Oracle, SAP, and SQL is free up the backup team from that daily grind to what higher level services can you offer,” he elaborates.

Building backup and recovery capabilities directly into storage systems, the virtualization layer and other components situated on what Manley refers to as the enterprise data path  has a number of advantages over using a traditional agent, he notes. The most notable of them is the ability to optimize operations based on the requirements of specific workloads instead of applying  blanket policies across an entire environment, which allows for much greater scalability and performance.

Just as significant is the flexibility to avoid having to wrap information in a “proprietary tarball” and simply work in native formats, Manley adds. That functionality is especially important when it comes to metadata,  which he  points out can provide invaluable insight not only into issues concerning the backup team but also areas relevant to an organization as a whole. Turning that potential into reality, however, is easier said than done.

“It’s not just creating a service that gets versions of data somewhere, it’s getting a service that helps manage that data. When you get that, then you got something,” Manley says.  To advance this vision, EMC has been working to arrange its once disparate portfolio of backup and recovery solutions in a so-called continuum with the goal of providing visibility across the entire information lifecycle.

As part of that effort,  the vendor has added support for third party agents to its NetWorker backup and recovery suite, integrated the Avamar deduplication software with VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service and increased the capacity of its Data Domain appliances to over a billion files, Manley details. On the corporate side, meanwhile, EMC consolidated its VPLEX, RecoverPoint and Backup & Recovery teams into a single unit in a move that he says has brought it much closer towards realizing its vision of making data protection available as a service for traditional enterprises.

“Even though that wasn’t a new product development, just bringing them into the division shifts the mindset from ‘it’s all about separate products and separate bind cycles’ to data protection becoming a service inside your infrastructure,” Manley concludes.

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