VMworld is still “the place to be” for discussing data center modernization—and that means that there were several data protection vendors in attendance, each with something to say.

But what was most interesting is the general shift in VMware’s tone from a hypervisor or data center-centric vision to a cloud-first vision, particularly with its announcements around running VMware on AWS. As ESG often states, “When you modernize production, you must modernize protection”—because changes to production infrastructure (physical, virtual, or cloud-powered) will often require changes in data protect strategy and tools.

Here is more on how the DP tools and strategies might need to be reconsidered as part of a modern IT architecture.

As always, thanks for watching.

P.S. If you are going to VMworld EU and want to continue the conversation, ping me to share ideas and a beverage.

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Jason Buffington. I’m the Principal Analyst at ESG covering data protection here at VMworld 2017. Every year, there’s lots of different data protection vendors that are among the largest exhibits on the show floor. But, there’s something different this year. If you roll the clock back even five years, you really did have to supplement your traditional data protection technologies with something that was VM specific. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. VADP from VMware is better. VSS from Microsoft is better. It’s not a question anymore of, “Can I back up your VM?” The question is, “How scalable is it? How manageable is it? What’s my agility of recovery?” The other thing we have to remember is, is that for the last several years, we’ve been on a journey where the presumed end-state was, “How virtualized will my data center be?” That’s not the end-state anymore. Cloud is here, and not just one cloud, but multiple clouds. Multi-cloud means IaaS hosted in Azure and Amazon with some Google storage and some Virtustream and some IBM and throw in that. Oh, by the way, applications running in SaaS, all of those are going to have different data protection requirements than the VMware, Azure, hyperconverged infrastructure for enabled set of on-prem building blocks. Put that all together and the data protection strategies that folks are looking for today is not VM-centric. It has to be heterogeneous, no matter how small or big your enterprise might be. And that’s what keeps things interesting.