The ongoing saga at OVH highlights the need to have solid disaster recovery plans that reflect the risk and impact of systems failure on the business. In this episode, Chris and Martin dig into the issues at OVH and how they represent a wake-up call for businesses in general. High profile failures have been apparent over many years, so does DR get the investment and respect it deserves? With so many more businesses operating with a 100% dependency on technology, you would expect so. Why does DR continue to be an afterthought and how has …
#193 – HYCU Protégé Office 365 Backup as a Service
This week, Chris and Martin are talking to a podcast repeat offender, Subbiah Sundaram, VP of Products at HYCU. HYCU has recently announced the availability of Protégé for Microsoft Office 365, delivered as SaaS or Backup as a Service (BaaS). This continues an expansion of the HYCU and Protégé backup offerings that started with Nutanix data protection and has expanded past on-premises virtualisation to encompass the public cloud and now SaaS. The conversation covers a wide range of topics relating SaaS and data protection, including the way in which services are implemented via APIs provided …
#183 – Magnetic Tape AMA (Ask Matt Anything)
This week Chris and Martin take the opportunity to grill (not broil) Matt Starr from Spectralogic to learn everything about magnetic tape. This episode came out of a discussion with Chris Mellor (episode #176) in which we asked the question why tape media doesn’t wear out. The answer is obviously within the podcast so you’ll need to listen to find out! In this conversation, the team look back at the evolution of tape but more importantly what we can expect in the future. Magnetic tape is more of an archive offering these days (although ransomware …
#165 – Homogeneous Data Protection with HYCU (Sponsored)
As we move to a hybrid and multi-cloud world, IT organisations need standardisation in operational processes. This is particularly true for data protection, where consistent policies and compliance are essential. This week, Chris chats to Subbiah Sundaram from HYCU about data protection in public clouds and the ability to bring a consistent reporting model with HYCU Protege. Why is consistency important? Public cloud providers have relatively basic data protection options, that might not align with existing enterprise requirements. As workloads move around, backup needs to be consistently applied, whether that data is on premises or …
#155 – Introduction to Clumio with Chadd Kenney
In this edition of the podcast, Chris chats to Chadd Kenney, VP and Chief Technologist at Clumio. Clumio is a SaaS data protection company that has recently expanded to support Office 365 environments. This discussion covers background on Clumio, how data protection for cloud should work and some specifics of the Clumio implementation. Looking deeper at the way in which the Clumio platform works, data from protected environments (such as VMware vSphere) lands directly on S3. This allows the solution to scale up to support thousands of concurrent backups, without needing to know that customers …
#144 – Introduction to Storage as a Service
This week, Chris and Martin chat to Gary Breder (Director of Cloud and Services Product Marketing) and Diane Clay (Sr Manager of Cloud and Services Product Marketing) from Hitachi Vantara about storage as a service. While we’ve had different consumption models in the past, does StaaS offer anything different? Perhaps the key takeaway from this conversation is the use of service-based offerings as a way to financially engineer more attractive cost structures to businesses. The vendor shoulders the risk with the customer by putting resources on the floor with an expectation of usage at some …
#139 – Storage Predictions for 2020 (Part II)
This is the second of our predictions shows for 2020 that anticipates what we can expect in enterprise storage for the year ahead. This episode covers solutions and vendors. We open with a discussion on cloud-native storage, which saw a lot of traction in 2019. Will the future be one of these companies or as Chris says, should we just rely on VMware to underpin our container environments? The discussion moves on to object storage and in particular a look at a company called MinIO. As an open-source solution with S3 compatibility, MinIO could be …
#135 – Introducing Datrium DRaaS Connect with Simon Long
This episode was recorded live at the Datrium offices in Silicon Valley. Chris chats to fellow Brit Simon Long about the announcement of DRaaS Connect and Instant RTO. Both are new features/products in the data mobility and DR space and complement Datrium’s existing storage and virtualisation offerings. Enterprises traditionally implement DR failover for virtual environments using techniques like storage replication and SRM. Datrium has offered DVX, Cloud DVX and Automatrix as tools to abstract and deliver DR capabilities to virtual machines. For customers that can’t immediately move to DVX, DRaaS Connect provides the capability to …
#132 – Accelerating Ransomware Recovery with Eran Brown (Sponsored)
This week Chris and Martin talk to Eran Brown, EMEA CTO at Infinidat about the challenges of ransomware and expediting fast recovery. Ransomware is a big challenge for IT organisations as hackers attempt to extort money from a range of businesses that include everything from large enterprises to healthcare organisations. However, is the traditional route of “restore from backup” actually practical or do IT organisations need a more comprehensive set of data protection and recovery techniques? Eran sets the scene by describing the impacts of ransomware attacks on businesses. Companies with customer-facing websites risk lost …
#129 – Choices for Persistent Container Storage with Niraj Tolia
This week Chris records a live podcast episode with Niraj Tolia, co-founder and CEO at Kasten Inc. As a follow-up to online discussions that dive into how container storage should be presented to Kubernetes (and other container) environments, this episode reviews some of Chris’ thoughts and Niraj’s opinions on the market as to how persistent storage should evolve. The discussion starts by reviewing the idea of either block or file storage for container environments and moves on to discuss whether application-based replication could simply replace the need to have a persistent storage back-end. The Container …