Name: Rich Colbert & Rob Emsley | Dell Technologies
Uploaded: 2024-04-30T15:12:00.000Z
Duration: 16 min 18 s

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More from Building Cyber Resilience on Trusted Data Protection Infrastructure

Rich Colbert

Field CTO

Dell Technologies

Rob Emsley

Director, Cyber Resilience Product Marketing

Dell Technologies

play_circle_outline Unveiling New Data Domain Appliances: An In-depth Analysis of Performance, Scalability, and Trustworthiness

play_circle_outline Dell Technologies PowerProtect appliances dominating the market

play_circle_outline Integration of Data Domain with Commvault

play_circle_outline Driving Simplicity: Unveiling PowerProtect Data Manager and APEX Backup Services as Game-Changing Offerings

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Rich Colbert & Rob Emsley | Dell Technologies

Rich Colbert

Field CTO Dell Technologies

Rob Emsley

Director, Cyber Resilience Product Marketing Dell Technologies

>> Welcome back to Building Cyber Resilience on Trusted Data Protection Infrastructure, brought to you by Dell Technologies and Intel. I'm pleased to bring Rich Colbert, Field CTO Data Protection at Dell, into the conversation along with Rob. Guys, the core of this announcement is really the new Data Domain appliances. Now, these appliances, for the audience, were a category creator going back over a decade ago, and they've endured. What has made Data Domain such a durable product category over all these years?

Rich Colbert

>> Well, I think it's a couple of things. I think that the Data Domain product has a track record with performance, scale, and efficiency. Those three things really go together, the ability to handle an organization's entire backup workload in a reasonable amount of time and a reasonable amount of space. So having that kind of secret formula, secret sauce, whatever you want to call it, to be able to be reliable in that sense. But I think more so than that is that the Data Domain platform has become the trusted storage of last resort. Data Domain systems do what they say they're going to do, they protect the data. They have an obligation to providing that data when something bad happens to it. And so a lot of organizations have come to rely on not just the features of the system, but the durability and the ability to trust it to get their data back.

>> Yeah.

Rob Emsley

>> It really the choice of customers in the market. As you mentioned, the market's been tracked for over a decade, and still today, coming out of 2023, 42of all dollars spent on backup appliances is spent on Dell Technologies PowerProtect appliances. And that's, to me, it's obviously very welcome, but it really does show that customers continue to go from generation to generation. As we discussed earlier, the next generation of Data Domain appliances, the ability to move from one generation to another is really straightforward for them. And we see many, many customers that simply by doing a appliance change with their existing backup data can immediately achieve improvements in backup performance, immediately achieve performance improvements in restore. And that is always a big deal whenever we do a tech refresh because our sales organization and our partners really take that message to all of our customers everywhere around the globe.

>> People, I mean, the audience may not remember, they used to do all this backup with tape. And so Data Domain really disrupted that and then became sort of the staple. That was very innovative technology at the time, and it's continued to advance. We heard earlier the performance improvements. It's also interesting that Commvault recently announced support for Data Domain Boost API. What is the significance... First of all, wow, you've got very interesting frenemies going on here, but what's the significance of that announcement to both, you all, your ecosystem, and customers?

Rob Emsley

>> I mean, one of the realities is that backup appliances come in two flavors, integrated and target. Integrated appliances from us run with our own software stack. Target appliances, the name suggests, can be a target for any backup and recovery application. And that's been true since really the beginning of the availability of Data Domain appliances. With Commvault's integration and API level integration, the nice thing for us is that four out of six of the Gartner Magic Quadrant Enterprise backup and recovery leaders now have API level integration with Data Domain appliances. So that really gives customers a great choice. Sure, we would love all of our customers to be running Dell software with Dell target-based appliances, but the reality is that the backup application market has been around for a very long time. So many customers choose either a different solution or they might combine multiple solutions together, and Data Domain becomes the common denominator for them.

Rich Colbert

>> One thing that's really nice about this, and I was kind of in the position at the beginning of this relationship, was that it really was customer driven. Customers had Commvault and Data Domain. They had experience with both, and they realized that working the two of them together in a kind of non-integrated fashion wasn't living up their expectations. This integration actually helps drive the simplicity and really maximizes what both solutions can do. And across the board, we're seeing simplicity driving this industry. The other part, to your point, is that the backup software industry is fractured. There's no vendor that has anywhere more than 5, maybe 8I think Dell has 12, and that becomes an 800-pound gorilla. The fact that we're able to reach so many customers and provide the things that Data Domain can do, irrespective of their backup software choice... Sure, we'd like it to be Dell, but we also want to be that open system provider that is helpful.

>> Smart by you guys, you become the infrastructure standard, open it up a little bit, and it makes the customers happy. It's a win-win. Data Domain of course gets a lot of attention. It's a big product category, but maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the other parts of the portfolio beyond Data Domain. I'm specifically interested in PowerProtect Data Manager and APEX Backup Services. How significant are these offerings and how should we think where they fit in the portfolio and the whole value chain, if you will, of that portfolio?

Rich Colbert

>> I think they're both a really big part of our strategy. I think we realized, and we kind of became aware, that simplicity was one of the things... One of the two main things driving adoption and data protection. The other one of course being cyber resiliency. But when it comes to simplicity, I think there was a wake-up call in this last decade or so where some new folks in the room kind of came in and kind of showed us that the folks were yearning for a backup solution that was simpler. It allows you to not have as much time in training, it increases the accuracy of the job that you're doing. So we took a lot of time and looked at what we had to offer and decided that Data Manager was the right way to go, a net new product with simplicity and API control built in from the ground up. It takes a long time to build software that is mature and serves the needs of the larger customers, the enterprise customers. But we really hit an inflection point in this last year with Data Manager where we nearly doubled or over doubled the number of customers in a single year. So it is definitely our go-forward strategy. It's hit a lot of the key workloads and a lot of the key operational maturity that we need to work with, and I think with the feedback that we're getting from our customers, it's even simpler than some of those new simple solutions that are out there. So we took our lesson and I think we've come up with a great solution.

Rob Emsley

>> Yeah. The nice thing is, and we've spoken about this in the past, is that we made a couple of key decisions about Data Manager, especially with our existing customers, many that have been with us for many, many years with some of our other products. We entitled those customers, as part of their support contracts, to make use of Data Manager. So, many of them have introduced it to complement specific workloads, especially for instance, vSphere Data Protection. We have some unique IP within PowerProtect Data Manager with Transparent Snapshots that we've spoken about in the past. So that allows them to gain access to a simpler modern platform as simply part of their existing relationship with Dell. So that was point number one. Secondly, we also, because we knew where they were and where we wanted them to go, we were able to do tooling to help them transition their policies, their agents from older technologies that many of them are still using to the modern platform as part of our overarching strategy to move them forward in the future. So make no mistake, PowerProtect Data Manager is absolutely our innovation engine as we go forward in the future. You saw last year, or actually the year before, we introduced a new integrated appliance using PowerProtect Data Manager, and that is kind of the second step. And as we go forward, you'll see us continue to evolve the availability of Power Protect Data Manager in different form factors, and that would be a big focus for us.

>> And you've got that tooling to make that migration much more facile. That's key for the innovation engine. Earlier we were discussing the need for trusted infrastructure to support cyber resilience, but multi-cloud complexity is a big challenge for customers and also is a big part of Dell's value proposition, your whole narrative there. What can you tell us about your multi-cloud posture, and specifically in this area, and your differentiation?

Rich Colbert

>> So a couple of things, and back to your previous question, APEX Backup Services is a big part of our multi-cloud posture. It allows us to reach workloads like Microsoft 365 and Google Cloud and so on in the public cloud. It's also a great SaaS-based offering for things like edge locations and smaller data centers. And it is growing. It is something that we've had a tremendous uptake from a customer perspective. But all of our data protection technology, the PowerProtect Data Domain platform in its virtual form as well as Data Manager, are also available in the public cloud. And we didn't just flip a switch and decide to make them available. Dell's cloud posture, data protection got there first. We had to start moving a long time ago into the public cloud to follow the workloads, to follow the data because customers would decide where to replatform, how to platform their data and applications. We had no choice but to simply move along. So around '16, you could start seeing our offerings in the public cloud marketplaces. So we have a little bit of a head start, and we've matured in terms of how to be cloud native and how to be cloud efficient. And what we're seeing today is a transition from customers away from kind of a cloud-first to a multi-cloud and more what you'd call a cloud-smart strategy. And that's the idea of putting the appropriate applications and data in the cloud or pulling them back on premises as their businesses need change or as their experience evolves.

>> Well, that on-prem experience has really closed the gap with cloud. People talk about, it's an operating model. And so the difference is far less than it was 15 years ago.

Rob Emsley

>> APEX Backup Services was only introduced in the last... Little over three years, 2021. And we're already serving over 200 customers around the globe because there's some customers, certainly in the medium part of the market, that effectively say to themselves, Hey, as I move more of my data center to the cloud, I want to move my data protection capabilities to the cloud.So adopting a backup as a service solution is available to them through APEX Backup Services. So one of the things we've always said is that we truly want to provide a one-stop shop with the options that our customers really want to take from us to solve their challenges, whether or not that be lift and shift their data protection infrastructure that they've been working with us on premises and lift it and deploy it as is in the public cloud, whether or not that be AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud platform, or move over to a backup the service offering. And that's how they can do that with APEX Backup Services.

>> Well, Jensen Huang said you're the number one at end systems. So who am I to argue with Jensen? Anyway, the survey data from our friends at ETR shows that the top-line tech spending growth remains tepid. And more importantly, GenAI is stealing from other budget areas. And so cost continues to be a challenge for a lot of organizations on top of the threats they face that we've been talking about today. So you guys have this tagline of modern, simple, and resilient, but how do you be those three things and at the same time be economically viable?

Rich Colbert

>> Well, that's where efficiency comes in, and that's something that's always been part of our message and it's something that we've remained focused on. And I think some of the other folks in the marketplace have really been focused more on the simplicity and on some of the cyber messaging. But we find that efficiency is what drives the affordability and the cost-rational side of the solution. Data protection backup in particular has always had to deal with data gravity. How do you store that much data? It could be 20 times more data in your protection copies than you have in your primary copies. And how do you move all that data around, whether it is from one data center to another or to the cloud or so forth? There's a lot to be gained if you can make that data very small and move it in an effective fashion. And that shows up on the bottom line too, because how much of a solution do you need to provision in order for the work to be taken care of? So they go hand-in-hand. The cost to serve that we have, I think, is compelling. We have a lot of models that we share with our customers on how to rightsize their data protection solution, how we're going to not guess at what they need to do, not have to add more capacity down the road. And that all comes out in things like our cost to protect surveys.

Rob Emsley

>> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that often customers get marketed cheaper solutions, acquisition price being the focus, but backups are not just for Christmas, backups are long-term retention of data. So you have to look at the entire total cost of ownership, and that's really where the Dell data protection infrastructure solutions really pay off on the bottom line, is when you look over a three or five-year horizon of the total cost of managing those backups. And that's where with the work we've done with the enterprise strategy group, for literally a cent per gigabyte per month, you can implement Dell data protection solutions on premises. And that's really where customers get a great benefit from us.

>> Well, and when you think about the business case for data protection, a lot of it is reducing the risk, reducing the expected loss, because what's the probability that you're going to either get hacked or lose data? It's very high. What's the impact of that? It's getting higher, as we know. So the faster you can recover and with quality data, the less risk there is.

Rich Colbert

>> Well, you mentioned that one of the big drivers of budget right now is AI, and I would say the second one right now is cyber resiliency. So we are seeing a lot more organizations invest in data protection as part of their cyber resiliency posture, and it's not so much about how they think about spending about backup and recovery, but how they look at the total picture and what's it going to take to be able to recover from a small, medium, or large impact cyber event.

>> Got it. Rich, Rob, thanks so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time.

Rob Emsley

>> Thank you.

>> Okay. Up next we get the analyst perspective from Christophe Bertrand. You're watching Building Cyber Resilience on Trusted Data Protection Infrastructure. We'll be right back.

Rich Colbert & Rob Emsley | Dell Technologies

Rich Colbert

>> Yeah.

Rob Emsley

Rich Colbert

Rob Emsley

Rich Colbert

>> Well, that on-prem experience has really closed the gap with cloud. People talk about, it's an operating model. And so the difference is far less than it was 15 years ago.

Rob Emsley

Rich Colbert

Rob Emsley

Rich Colbert

>> Got it. Rich, Rob, thanks so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time.

Rob Emsley

>> Thank you.

>> Okay. Up next we get the analyst perspective from Christophe Bertrand. You're watching Building Cyber Resilience on Trusted Data Protection Infrastructure. We'll be right back.