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.
Copy Data Management (CDM) and all the permutations of “Copy” “Data” “Management” with or without additional terms like “Active” “Enterprise” “Virtualization,” etc., seems to be the rage these days. A few years ago, there was only one visionary company talking about CDM. Today, we see a range of vendors now claiming to be CDM, even when they don’t deliver the breadth of capabilities that the industry may have presumed CDM to be; and others who have been quietly delivering those capabilities and more, without the terminology (a.k.a. they were CDM before CDM was cool).