In an appearance in TheCUBE at VMworld 2012, EMC’s President of Backup Recovery Systems William “BJ” Jenkins took the mic to explain how the tech titan is rethinking its approach to backup and recovery in the age of data-intensive applications and bring-your-own device – and offer some hints as to EMC’S acquisition strategy, besides.

There were three recurring themes in Jenkins’ talk with SiliconANGLE Co-Founders John Furrier and Dave Vellante:

Infrastructure needs to “understand” data

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When you begin to move to converged infrastructure – a hot topic at VMworld at large – you may see great strides in storage efficiency, in IOPS. But there’s a commensurate need for new data protection and backup best practices and management layers. EMC aims to reduce storage footprint for backups, reduce resource usage, and provide APIs for file-level restore, says Jenkins. Moreover, it’s increasingly important for CIOs to deploy infrastructure that “understands” the data and apply policy automatically, ensuring data “gets where it needs to go” across apps and infrastructure. Essentially, the goal is to protect and archive all data across a virtualized infrastructure, no matter where it lives, in a way that’s transparent to the user.

IT Insight: tools for data protection, management

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IT needs tools for management and reporting on their data protection and archiving initiatives. In the emerging data infrastructure market, where the converged infrastructure concept is augmented by technologies like flash storage (SSD) and Hadoop, it’s possible to process huge amounts of data on a single transaction. Jenkins says that in order to both demonstrate business value and simply keep tabs on where the data is being kept, it’s vital to give IT insight. And to that end, Jenkins says that at EMC, it’s a priority to help IT use the tools they’re already comfortable with to get insight into their backup architectures.

Fix the disconnect: cloud backup shouldn’t be disaster recovery

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Finally, Jenkins says that in the next 12 months or so, EMC is really going to tackle the problem of cloud backup. What most consider cloud backup, Jenkins says, is actually making a local copy and shunting it to the cloud. Just look at Amazon Glacier: Sure, you’re keeping a copy of your data in the deep freeze (pun very much intended), but recoverability isn’t a priority. Cloud backup, in its current form, is a lot more like disaster recovery, Jenkins says. Right there, that disconnect, is where EMC sees opportunity to innovate and expand its portfolio, especially as services remain as vital as ever in the virtualization era. And if you want to make predictions around EMC’s backup acquisition strategy, it might behoove you to think along those lines, though Jenkins remained noncommittal.

Watch the video

Those were just some of the themes of Jenkins’ talk in TheCUBE. Feel free to watch his full video interview here and see what else Jenkins had to say about converged infrastructure, backup, virtualization the cloud, and the fact that tape isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.