Guy Churchward, President of Backup and Recovery Systems at EMC, visited theCube during EMC World 2013 to discuss the current state of backup and its position in software-defined architecture with hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante.

Recently, EMC’s BRS division has gone so far as to say that “backup is broken,” when discussing the problems that customers have been having. Dave Vellante opened the conversation by asking Churchward for the specifics and what his team is doing about it. Churchward explained by defining the term “accidental architecture,” when application vendors will develop their own “rogue or renegade” development platforms, paradigms, etc. when not provided with an efficient enough method of executing its backup.

“You end up with data silos where you have ten different ways of backing up the data. It’s distributed, there’s security issues, it’s not in a centralized pool, everything goes wrong.” Backup has become the “long pole” in the process, and most organizations now have multiple ways of doing backups. “We have to get ahead of that, have a much more agile way of executing against it from a portfolio perspective,” Churchward stated.

When asked about the evolution of backup and data recovery, Churchward explained, “Right now, we’re moving from backup and recovery, to data protection, and then to data management.  And you have to basically split from specifically being around on-premise, to on-premise and off-premise. Increasingly, we’re seeing customers moving toward a hybrid model.” Customers now need holistic backup, compliance, or archiving programs that will enable them to monitor both the on-premise data and the cloud services.

How does the BRS division fit into software-defined storage?

Being on top of the software trend, EMC is creating virtualized editions of most of their products. As Churchward explains, most of EMC’s value is in software. Even when you look at appliances like Data Domain, it gets applied with software like Data Invulnerability Architecture and Data Domain Boost. “So when you look at the software-defined architecture, I would see [software], including ViPR, almost as a storage service bus,” Churchward says. “So we’ve got two sides. One, we want to be the protection platform behind the storage itself, and, second, you’ve got that transform mechanism, but you still need application sensitivity and a protected storage architecture.”

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