Revolutionary Ideas

NetBackup has a long history of coopetition. Heterogeneous backup means that some of our best partners are also at times fierce competitors.

An excellent example is EMC. We partner and compete in numerous ways.

I was recently reading an EMC blog post titled “Peace, Love and Revolution” written by Scott Waterhouse. He made an impassioned plea for backup vendors to create advanced ways to interacts with storage devices.

“Why can't my backup application either instruct the appliance to replicate, and make an entry into the catalog of retained data? Or, why can't my appliance notify the backup application of the second, remote copy?

And how do I coordinate this with the database used by the backup application to hold its catalog of data protected, virtual and physical tapes, and so on?” – Scott Waterhouse.

I think William Gibson said it best when he said that "the future is here, it is just unevenly distributed."

What Scott describes in his  blog posting and makes a plea for vendors to implement is the functionality that NetBackup has TODAY and has had for some time. We delivered the groundwork for this functionality that we call Open Storage last year. Vendors like Data Domain are already shipping systems that implement this functionality. If you want more detail read about it on page 17 of the “Disk Based Data Protection” white paper written by Alex Davies.

I’m glad EMC sees the need for intelligent devices that would allow the backup software to tell the device to replicate the data intelligently.

Thanks for the idea EMC. You have eloquently stated the problem which we started solving two years ago and released late last year.

The future is a fun place to work … wish you were here Scott :)

Message Edited by TimBur on 04-17-2008 02:13 PM

Message Edited by TimBur on 04-28-2008 02:06 PM