One of the largest challenges facing enterprises today in respect to backup and recovery is successfully meeting all of the different backup and recovery requirements associated with each application. Physical backups, virtual backups, instant recoveries, application-specific backup requirements and much more make successfully executing upon a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy more difficult than ever before. In this eighth installment of my interview series with Brett Roscoe, General Manager, Data Protection for Dell Software, he shares how Dell has brought together its various data protection products into one backup and disaster recovery suite to make it easier to customers to address these challenges with a single solution.
Jerome: Can you discuss this emerging trend in the data protection industry for providers to bundle together different but complementary backup and software together in a single product suite. In fact Dell software recently announced the launch of the Dell Backup and Disaster Recovery Suite. Can you talk about this new suite and how it might benefit customers?
Brett: Absolutely. I’m really excited about the suite. It accomplishes quite a few things for our customers. Most importantly, it allows customers to use and leverage all of the Dell data protection IP with one simple licensing model. This is a great story just from a customer perspective, and that’s before we even finish all of the exciting integration projects we currently have in development
With the Dell Backup & Disaster Recovery Suite, customers have the freedom to leverage the best tool set for whatever their application is or whatever portions of their environment they want or need to protect. You may have a team that’s very focused on virtualization and vRanger is a great fit into that environment. You may have a critical application that you feel like you can have no more than five minutes of down time, in which case, AppAssure can come in and help you build a solution there. You may have traditional, file-based, cross platform protection needs, in which case, NetVault is an outstanding choice. With one license, you get the freedom to mix and match these technologies based on your specific needs. That to me is a great story.
As I look across the industry, I don’t know of any vendor that has the broad portfolio capabilities that we do, much less the ability to give customers access to that entire portfolio through a single license.
Not only are we giving you all of the capabilities you need, but we’ve simplified the purchase by offering a single capacity based license that gives you that broad portfolio capability. You do not have to choose. You do not have to be locked into a certain product. In fact with our portfolio , you can even change your implementation over time without changing your license.
Maybe you start out with a primarily physical environment that has one set of requirements. Then you move to a more virtual or cloud-based environment over time. As your RPO/RTO requirements shift, you can reconfigure the Dell product set that you’re using in order to provide the best fit and value for you changing needs.
There is a lot of flexibility there, but I want to be clear that this is just the start. We have a robust integration road map. We are still doing all the cool things on the development side to make it easy as possible for customers to use all of the IP, but the Dell Backup & Disaster Recovery Suite allows customers to take advantage of all of our capabilities today.
I think the suite is a great value as it can allow a customer to grow up with us. A customer can start as a small business with one portion of a portfolio and grow larger while having access to a more comprehensive portfolio without any disruption or major forklift upgrades.
Jerome: Sounds like some pretty exciting times for Dell. What’s the general morale at Dell in terms of where you are at and where you are going with all this?
Brett: I’ll tell you, I feel very fortunate to be at Dell, and to be involved with our data protection business specifically. I feel like it is just one of the fun areas right now. Data protection has traditionally been seen as a form of insurance, but the landscape in data protection is changing, and customers are using our products in new ways and finding ways to reduce risk, and it is great to be a part of that change.
You are always going to “have to have it”, but new features and capabilities can often change the way customers use or leverage our products and free up resources for our customers to invest in other areas.
Also, customers feel like data protection is becoming a more critical part of the environment. They know they got to have it. But they also see these new capabilities and these changing tool sets, and how they can now show the value of data protection to their customers and management teams, and free up resources to work on other projects. It is fun to see some of the testimonials we get from our customers, how they are using our products, and the cool things they are doing with it.
Personally, I am very bullish about data protection portion at Dell. I love my job and cannot imagine doing anything else right now. We are just having a lot of fun.
In Part VI of this interview series, Brett and I discuss Dell’s growing role as a software provider.
In Part VII of this interview series, Brett provides an in-depth look at Dell’s new Backup and Disaster Recovery Suite.
In Part IX of this interview series, Brett shares his thoughts as to what he sees as the future of data protection over the next decade.