One of the more thoughtful analysts in the industry, in my opinion is George Crump from Storage Switzerland. (I like the name and George is as independent as you can get in

this business.) Yesterday I had the pleasure of briefing George on EMC's Data Protection Vision. I like talking with George for a couple of reasons. First, he gets it. What does that mean. Read his material. He is genuinely trying to educate IT folks on what is really important in the data center and how to address these challenges. Next, he keeps the 'pay for', 'vendor spin' to a minimum. George works hard to just talk about the facts of a product or industry and talk about how products can help without selling. The reality is, we live in a great technological time. The problem with IT is that only 50% of the problems are technology related. The other 50% is psychological. IT can't just implement new technology because its cool or even because it really does solve a problem. Sometimes new technology is too expensive to implement or the solution that is currently in place had a three year amortization and your only two years into your product life. Or, more importantly, the new technology may be the greatest technology at the right price but it doesn't fit into the current IT priorities. These are all things IT needs to work through when considering whether or not to invest in new technology. The other thing George and I spoke about was the fact that it gets difficult to be 'strategic' in IT especially given certain economic times. A lot of times IT just needs a band-aide or quick fix to move on to more important issues that really drive the business. I talk about this a lot, especially when it comes to backup. Lets face it, it may not be what we all want to hear but backup is not strategic to most environments. The applications that drive the business are most important. Backup is about risk mitigation and information availability if everything else fails. Right, 'if everything else fails', and IT typically invests in technology in the front end in an effort to have as little failure as possible. Meaning, IT doesn't just buy JBOD with no RAID if they think the environment shouldn't be put at that kind of risk. So IT is already investing in some risk management up front which drives the spend on the back end for data protection.

I wanted to say "Thanks" to George for taking the time to come in and understand the bigger strategy EMC is driving with its products in the data protection space and to talk about our existing successes with the current portfolio. Hopefully George, as well as all of you, can see how we are helping to put customers on the Road to Recovery.

Tags:

Avamar, Backup, CDP, Data Protection, Data Protection Advisor, Data Protection Management, DDUP, EMC, Recovery