Data protection and management in hybrid, multi-cloud world

With IT undergoing tectonic shifts and moving into a hybrid, multi-cloud world, it’s important to manage and protect your data seamlessly. CommVault, the leading data protection and management solutions provider made several exciting announcements on how to enable this at their annual conference. Here’s a summary.

Data is the new oil of the 21st century, and companies must do everything they can to manage, protect, and leverage their own data. In other words, they must be “Data Ready” in order to move ahead in this new and fast-paced digital world. How should organizations prepare themselves and be data ready was also therefore the main theme of CommVault Go, the annual conference of leading data protection solutions provider CommVault.

The company has been taking rapid strides since early last year. They appointed a new CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, from Puppet Inc., acquired leading software defined storage player Headvig, and even announced their first SaaS based offering, Metallic at the conference.

According to Sanjay, being data ready means having the ability to protect, control, manage and use data anywhere, anytime regardless of which application it was created on. This is becoming increasingly complex with IT undergoing seismic shifts.

IT undergoing seismic shifts
According to Mirchandani, there are four seismic shifts and unprecedented, game-changing tech breakthroughs that are happening in IT today. These comprise of:
* Move to multi-cloud
* Next-gen or cloud-native applications
* Increasing levels of automation
* Changing tech economics.

The multi-cloud world brings with it cloud native applications that are built to scale for loosely coupled APIs, which can be moved around and scaled out of the box. They’re decoupling infra from applications. So much so that IDC predicts that by 2024, 90% of global 1000 organizations will reduce their dependence on infrastructure lock-in by using the cloud, and by around 2022, 35% of mission critical production apps will be cloud native.

Move to the cloud is therefore, non-optional, according to IDC, and around 70% of the CIOs already have a cloud first strategy, with 90% of organizations intending to use the cloud as a portion of their data protection strategy in the next 12 months.

The third trend of increasing levels of automation is bringing DevOps and automation together. “This gives users unprecedented scale, allowing them to do things they couldn’t imagine doing earlier”, said Sanjay. On top of that, the economics of technology have changed considerably, allowing companies to choose the infra they want to pay for, and scale it up or down as per their requirements. Computing therefore has become very easy to acquire.

Managing data more complex
Embracing these seismic technology shifts is inevitable for most organizations, because of the freedom they give to move data anywhere, whether on or off-prem, or to any kind of cloud or application. “It also makes data management more difficult, because organizations have multiple generations of infrastructure, protocols, security layers, and applications spitting out data everywhere”, added Sanjay.

"Though numerous point solutions are available to manage data, they also result in numerous points of failure. It’s too enormous a task for point solutions to manage effectively. “You need solutions that are truly comprehensive that think through the scenarios. That’s where CommVault comes in. We’ll help you be Data Ready," he added.

Data and storage management to build next-gen solutions
Enterprises must bring data and storage management together to build next generation solutions. This is only possible if data is abstracted from the underlying infrastructure.

Sanjay calls this the data brain, or the plane in which data and storage run in a unified way. The right side of the brain is the creative side, and connotes traditional data management, covering things like indexing, intelligent automation, security, self-service, etc. It controls data across planes. Combining this with software-defined storage can democratize the underlying storage infrastructure, which is where the left or logical side of the brain comes in.

It addresses existing data management challenges in a new way, like managing multiple protocols, automated storage provisioning, API automation, etc. “Having software defined storage combined with traditional data management can provide true location transparency, thereby allowing your applications to run with the regional compliance policies," said Sanjay.

CommVault has been able to unify storage and data management through its recent acquisition of Headvig, the software defined storage company, and one of the hottest startups around. The software-defined storage capabilities of Headvig aim to enable enterprises to automate and simplify storage administration and reduce storage cost.

“Headvig allows complete protocol consolidation on one platform because we believe ops efficiency is the key problem to be addressed at scale. We enable this in a very comprehensive fashion, and our products make this possible in hybrid, multi-cloud, world while providing companies the fault tolerance and data sovereignty they need”, said Avinash Laxman, founder of Headvig and Chief Storage Strategist, CommVault.

Managing data in multi-cloud world
Fundamentals don’t change by moving to the cloud. Companies still need to think about data security, sovereignty, recovery from an outage, protection against ransomware, ensuring data compliance, etc. Sanjay felt that addressing these concerns requires a different thinking. First, you have to manage data fragmentation as every application is tightly coupled with the data it produces.

Second, you have to think about the infrastructure because in a hybrid world, you have workloads that are both on-prem and off-prem, which you should be able to expand or contract to the cloud as per your need. You must have the portability and agility to use the right workload with the right infra for the right need. “This is possible when you abstract the infrastructure to prevent lock in”, said Sanjay.

Third, applications are transforming organizations. Both legacy and new applications have to be brought together regardless of their infrastructure.

How CommVault is aligning with seismic shifts?
You need to protect, control, manage, and use the data they produce. That’s where CommVault comes in. Pointing out some statistics, Sanjay said that CommVault already manages over 11 EB of data for its customers, with over 700 PB of data growing in the cloud. The company protects over 1.6 million servers (reported by 40% of the company’s customers) and has done approximately 45 Mn backup jobs with 98% success rate.

With four broad product categories, i.e. Backup and recovery, Orchestrate, Hyperscale, and Activate, the company has been putting a lot of thought in four areas. First, the company’s products are built cloud ready. Second, they’re helping applications with replication, orchestration, and DR, all in the cloud built in together. Third, they’ve built a lot of AI/ML into their products to enable this. Fourth, they’ve been focusing on customer feedback and made its products elegant, intuitive, and much easier to use.

Overall, CommVault has been re-building its products portfolio around the core design principles of flexibility and choice.

• Anil Chopra

- The author was hosted in Denver, USA, by CommVault.