Stephen Manley, EMC | VMworld 2011

SiliconANGLE's theCube presented a spotlight on virtual backup and recovery at VMworld 2011. Guest Stephen Manley, CTO of Backup and Recovery at EMC, met with Dave Vellante, Co-Founder of Wikibon to discuss the future of virtual backup and recovery.

Manley described his role at EMC as the "three C's": 1) understanding what technology curves are coming out, 2) meeting with customers, and 3) figuring out where the competition is heading.

When asked about EMC's vision as it relates to backup and recovery, Manley said that one of the big things that have changed in the backup space is the rise of deduplication and what that's brought with disk. He observed that many customers are saying their user experience has not changed much, and therefore, there are two trends to watch for: 1) due to the size and amount of data, applications and systems that own the data need to take a more active role in the backup and 2) different customers and administrators are taking an active role in the backup. The backup team needs to provide infrastructure where each of those groups can control and centralize their backups.

Manley used VMware as an example of how customers are starting to take a more active role in the backup task. He said VMware has a feature called "change block tracking," which tells the admins what has changed since the last backup. With only backing up the most recent changes, the backup window becomes shorter, the system load is lower, and if needed, a change block recovery can be used to rollback the system to a certain point in time.

So how does it work if the customer has a non-homogeneous environment? Manley believes a centralized backend infrastructure should be used so that local administrators have control to a point, but still should be watched so that the best practice guidelines for the company are met.
Vellante wondered if the backup window could be eliminated in this lifetime. Manley stated definitively that it could. He said it's already evolving to where only changes made since the last backup are being backed up, and this process is only taking minutes, versus hours or days, and the more the legacy infrastructure is virtualized, the more the backup window will start to shrink.