Netting Out NetBackup

Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Saradhi Sreegiriraju, a Product Manager from Data Domain. Data Domain is a partner in our OpenStorage initiative. If you aren't familiar with OpenStorage you can read all about it in section 3.5 of this Symantec whitepaper on "NetBackup Disk Based Data Protection".

Q. Tell us a little more about yourself. How long have you been with Data Domain and what is your role there?

A. I’m the Product Manager at Data Domain for the NetBackup OpenStorage product. I also have Product Management responsibilities for our System Management and Quality of Service products. I’ve been with Data Domain for the past 22 months and prior to that I was with NetApp and Fujitsu.

Last Wednesday I scraped frost and snow off my windshield and headed for the airport and ultimately the Atlantis Resort in Nassau, Bahamas. When you live in Minnesota and winter has already arrived, stepping off a plane in a hot place in the tropics always feels like magic.

I was at the Atlantis as part of an annual event Symantec throws to honor the people who have filed patents, been awarded patents or have driven significant innovation. As a bonus you also get to bring a guest – which is a pretty nice perk if you were thinking about joining Symantec.  The events were fun and it was also a great opportunity to meet with my colleagues from around the globe face to face.

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I meant to blog daily at the Customer Forum, but I was having too much fun and spent a few too many hours in the office.

Here are a few tidbits that stuck out in my mind.

De-dupe is still red hot in the marketplace. You could look at Data Domain's earnings and understand what I am talking about. The customers are excited about the technology and our approaches and there is a lot still going on in this space.

People are still hungry for the basics to be simpler and easier to use. We are working on that and were able to show some "sneak peeks". The enthusiasm was even better than I expected. I can't wait to start unveiling more of it in public.

It was clearer than ever that thin provisioning isn't just for disks it also for the people. The same person wears the hat of SAN administrator, backup architect, troubleshooter, deployment guru and titles too...

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Times have changed a lot since then.

Customers who were once thrilled to replace a ton of individual...