Christophe's Corner

Welcome to the Hitachi Data Systems Business Continuity blog. Let’s get something out of the way right now, since you’re taking the time to read this! I am a product and solutions marketer, so I love my technology. I even get paid for it! This being said, I’ve been in the backup and data protection business for a while and with a variety of vendors, so I really want this blog to be about what’s happening in this space and how technology helps or sometime complicates the quest for data protection.

I have spent a lot of time talking to customers and partners about what Business Continuity really is, and invariably, I get a different answer every time I ask people to define it. It is fascinating to me how a simple question can yield so many different answers. It’s usually a combination of “backup”, “disaster recovery”, “high availability” and other permutations with complicated acronyms. I know a lot of these myself, but no one is impressed anymore.

There’s really an elephant in the room when I ask the question – and it’s usually about money and priorities. Seriously, the business and IT decisions that provide the backbone of your IT infrastructure are very complex ones to arrive at, when you do… Let me explain, in many ways, the idea that you have to be in business to backup or recover data assets is somewhat unnatural to many storage and data center managers. Can we blame them?

We’re in the middle of a hurricane that’s deluging petabytes of data on us. I hear customers telling me how their data growth rate is double or triple digits year-on-year, and their budgets not necessarily commensurate (heard this one before?). I recently read an article based on research from a well-known storage analyst that explains how private sector archiving will soon be at tens of thousands of petabytes (that’s a lot of zeros!) of archived data. How do we manage all of these data assets, let alone protect them efficiently and effectively?

So, in this blog, I would like to explore, in time, and with the help of many friends, colleagues, and my keen sense of observation, how we can do a better job driving IT decisions that are essentially intrinsic to how a business needs to be managed, how data assets should be protected, and what technologies can help. How’s that for fun? And expect to hear from what some customers are REALLY doing, and not just the marketing glossies.

Some of the themes I’ll be covering in the next few weeks will revolve around business and technologies like backup and data replication. I asked a few people what they’d be interested in, and there are many technology themes to cover such as multiple data center topologies , managing data protection environments, thin provisioning and replication, very large mainframe environments and replication, de-duplication, the impending death of tape (not so fast!!). On the business front, which really drives the decision, I’ll be spending time on the theme of operational efficiency and resilience, mitigating risks, return on investment vs. data loss, and many more.

What themes would you like to see covered?

Before I go, let me ask you a loaded question: What are your chances of recovering your top 5 critical applications (Do you have those ranked by the way?) should a major interruption hit your data center?