SAN FRANCISCO – In a small black room sitting near the centre of VMworld 2009, a Toronto-based solution provider is getting companies to tell the truth about their cloud computing and virtualization problems.
Asigra, which focuses on backup and recovery technologies, has been greeting scores of customers attending this year’s VMware (NYSE: VMW) user conference and answering their questions about dealing with data loss once they’ve moved into a virtual or cloud environment. These discussions are happening in what Asigra executive vice-president Eran Farajun calls “the backup confessional,” which is built into its booth at the show.
As they outline their IT infrastructure, Asigra is capturing the information and turning it into a printed report which provides an assessment of how they could deploy cloud backup easy and cost-effectively. This free consulting is then passed on as a lead to Asigra’s channel partners, who will then follow up to see about deploying Asigra’s products, Farajun said.
“They can talk to a partner, we can set up a WebEx and build them an architecture,” he told CDN, adding its on-site questionnaire at VMworld takes about 25 minutes. “We ask what does their environment look like – do you have two or three data centres, 250 locations. We pass that back to our resellers because all of our sales are handled that way. We’re a software company.”
Asigra is discovering that backup issues are becoming a major pain point for early adopters of cloud computing and virtualization, according to Farajun. That’s because traditional backup is tightly coupled to the hardware associated with it. In the cloud, the backup layer has to be abstracted into its own layer. That way, Farajun said companies may realize they’re capturing far more data than they really need to – so the savings come as much from efficiency as anything else.
“Our confession back to the customer is that backup is boring. We know that,” he said. “Backup is like exercise – it’s something you know you have to do, but no one’s really interested in doing that. We want you to be able to go back to focus on the cool stuff – whatever cool means to you.”
Many companies make the mistake of confusing cloud backup with online backup, Farajun said. Instead of merely hosting backup data online, a good cloud solution should make it easy for customers to move their data away from one service provider to another and avoid lock-in with a company like Amazon, for instance. “Otherwise, you end up with companies that have to orphan their data,” he said. “The truth is a lot of enterprises aren’t going to do it, but they like to know that they can.”
Farajun said Asigra is counting on resellers to help educate customers about cloud backup issues, given that most firms pursue it only after a data loss incident, or because they’ve been asked by an auditor to show compliance with certain policies or regulations. “Inertia is really our biggest competitor,” he said. “There’s a sense that, if there’s been no data loss event, I don’t want to tinker with anything.”
VMware has spent much of this week’s conference reassuring customers about the stability of its platform. In his keynote speech Wednesday VMware CTO Stephen Herrod said the company “has become the whipping boy in the data centre when anything going wrong with the servers,” but said recent enhancements to vSphere should change that.
“I won’t demonstrate the fault-tolerance again,” he said, “even though I think it’s one of the most exciting features we’ve introduced in years.”
VMworld 2009 wraps up Thursday.
