Storage virtualization, cloud storage, and solid-state storage are coming together to reduce the complexity and cost of data backup and recovery and, for large enterprises with petabytes of data, make data protection practical again, says Jim McNiel, VP and Chief Strategy Officer of FalconStor.

“Historically, doing backup was creating a file and putting it on removable media,” he said today in an interview on SiliconAngle TV from EMCworld 2010. “The data at Sunguard has to be identical to what I have down to the registration numbers on the servers, practically, for it to work in a restore…. Virtualization takes away that hardware layer.”

In a fully virtualized storage environment, any data can run on any storage box. To restore data after a crash, “all you have to do is identify a location on the network and load the data.” All the complexity of getting data to run on a different box than the one it came from is eliminated, making recovering much faster, easier, and more likely to succeed at all.

Virtual is the new practical

This is particularly important in heterogeneous environments, for instance in very large enterprises, which “have every system under the sun.” But it also can be important for mid-sized companies because it frees them of the lock-in to a particular storage vendor, and it makes things much easier if, for instance, they merge with another company with a different physical storage environment. And it makes data migration from one environment to another routine.

Cloud computing cuts the expense of data backup and restoration considerably, providing a practical solution for many midrange companies that today have no data protection. Of course, McNiel says, you have to work with a reputable vendor and know that that provider is doing its own backup, but for many midsized companies, moving your backup to a vendor like Google or Amazon.com makes sense. “If you make shoes, why not move your data to the cloud rather than trying to manage it yourself?”

Virtualization also makes it much easier to add solid-state storage to the environment. Solid-state provides very high speed storage which can solve problems in several areas. In the financial industry and other applications that involve high-speed transactions, solid-state can speed transactions and ensure that they are accurately recorded. In very large enterprises with petabytes of data it can make data backup practical again.

“Big companies have too much data to be able to move it around on the network,” he says. Rather than do that, “they need to be able to snapshot their data in real time, capture every byte that is changed as it changes.” Essentially they need to constantly update their data backups to eliminate the need to do a complete new backup of their data. That requires the speed of solid state.

So what is McNiel’s vision? “I want to walk into an enterprise with an appliance that discovers all the data in the environment, understands how it is used, and who has access. It can organize and categorize the data according to its priority and backup needs, then enforce business policies to determine what data is backed up where and when. Now when you add flash storage, the policy is automatically modified, and when things go to the Cloud it just happens, and you don’t have to worry about it.”