The New Hammer
I was having lunch with a mentor of mine the other day, who is also in the technology world, and he said something very profound.
He said, “Steve, we sell hammers.” The point here is there are a lot of technology products in the market that have a lot of competitors. He went on to say, “What makes your hammer better than the other guys hammer?” Typically, it’s about a feature or two, in the case of hammers, maybe it’s weight and shaft length and then most always price. I mean it’s a hammer right, they all do the same thing. So, why is your hammer better any other hammer? At the end of the day it’s about value. Meaning for the price, do I get what I need. Does the product work as advertised and should something happen to the hammer (product), does the vendor have a good reputation of standing behind your product?
I thought about this and it really is that simple.
When you break it down, there are over 100 data protection products in the market today. They all have a few features that the other may not, but typically, and especially in the data protection world, these products all catch up and leapfrog each other over the course of time. What matters the most is does the product have the features you require for your business today and to grow while fitting into your budget.
Next, in order to make your decision you look at the products brand or reputation. Data protection is a bit more sophisticated than a hammer. At some point, you may need to call customer support for help or to report an issue and you need to feel confident you will get the service you need. You probably also do due diligence to make sure the company is going to be around for a while once you make your investment. However, at the end of the day, price is a very controlling string attached to that puppet that is data protection.
The Best Hammer – Spectrum Protect Plus
IBM is launching a new product called IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. This new product has all the feature functionality that the other 100 players in the market have, and has developed key new features that matter most in today’s data protection world.
First, it is incredibly easy to use. Easy to install, easy to configure, easy to manage and easy to perform backups and recoveries. Administrators can set SLA polices to data sets to automate a more intelligent protection process. The management is so easy in fact, it can be configured for secure, self-service recover or data access for others in the organization.
Second, Spectrum Protect Plus has been developed to enable data reuse use cases, which is the future of data protection. Protected data in the organization can be as much as four times the capacity as the primary storage capacity. The need to be able to take advantage of this data for new business functions is paramount. Spectrum Protect Plus allows clients to spin up copies of data that can be utilized for a number of new use cases including DevOps, Test/Dev, Reporting, analytics and any other use case that may require a copy of production data.
Finally, and best of all, Spectrum Protect Plus is the most economical solution on the market adding the most value to your environment.
As clients, if you’re in the market for a new “tool” to do you’re not only your data protection job, but also enable next generation use cases for backup data, you need not look any further. Spectrum Protect Plus will not only meet all of your data protection needs today, it will evolve with business, enable you to maximize your data use for new use cases, comes from a company you know you can trust and won’t break the bank.
I have been in the data protection world for a long time, 20+ years. I have worked with VERITAS, ESG (as a data protection analyst), Connected Corporation, Iron Mountain, Avamar, EMC, and IBM. I am very excited about how this market is evolving and the fact that we are now in a mode where leveraging data that has typically been considered “stale” is now adding more value to the business. Hammers add value to businesses but haven’t needed to evolve in order to add “more” value, data protection has needed to evolve. I am really excited about Spectrum Protect Plus. It not only protects your business but takes it to the next level.
