Have you ever watched a magician, performing sleight of hand tricks, up-close?  I consider myself an observant sort but must admit to being tricked” by these “tricksters” to the point that my own watch was removed from my wrist whilst my attention was drawn elsewhere. It’s a simple case of misdirection, which, when I speak with customers, seems present in their resepctive planning and decisison making processes. Only for them it’s not an entertaining performance but rather their business and its network that could be misdirected.

Several years ago I wrote a blog that laid out a timeline of the “big movements” in IT, which refered to ‘the timeline of influence’. Among this timeline was, perhaps the most disruptive movement we’ve seen in IT – that of virtualization.  I remember when it hit big in production environments, so many were moving from DEV/Test into production and claiming victory!  And rightfully so, this was a long and onerous task but it seems they forgot one thing…backup.

If you follow the market research, as I do, you’ll remember that back in 2010 the #1 top of mind technology initiative was virtualization with backup at #5, while DR/BC was #8. This was largely due to that aforementioned influence virtualization was having on IT and the initiatives around deployment into production.  However, after reviewing the context of that research for the following year (2011), as I predicted, backup climbed to #1, while DR/BC jumped up to #6.

If the reader can remember two years back they will recall when virtualization was in our Dev/Test eco-systems. And it really didn’t matter how it was backed up, or if it backed up at all – it was Dev/Test, after all.  When it’s in production, our IT instincts were to back it up the way we backed up everything else – put an agent on it and run it!

The problem with that solution, the VM tax.  VM tax is what you pay when you backup all those VMs  as you did physical machines. Remember, virtualization turns one machine into many, which is akin to taking one sports car and turning it into 50 speedy Mini Coopers, which all want to run at the highest performance possible. The issue is that there’s really only ONE engine to do all the work.

Virtualization altered our vision for how servers could be deployed but, in some cases, it crippled data protection solutions designed to protect our ‘data crown jewels’. Just like that magician’s sleight of hand and misdirection to remove my watch, sometimes new technology in our industry may cause us to take our eyes off our (proverbial) watches sometimes.

Now let’s fast forward to today – and this blog’s title…  One of the key takeaways we must learn from the virtualization story is to remember not to lose sight of the key foundational pillars for a successful IT organization – that of the protection of the data, itself.

As you explore big data and data analytic solutions ask yourself these questions: “how is this going to be protected?” and “what, specifically, do we need to protect it?”

Even with nearly 30 years in this game, I recently found myself lost in this issue as I sat through a new technology presentation. Fortunately, I recovered from the trance this new technology put on me, with enough time to consider data protection before the presentation ended. Point being, this misdirection can and does happen to all of us and will only continue to do so as the pace of technology advancement increases.

I think this new era we have entered is an important one for our industry, equally as important is protection and retention of the data.

-Chapa, signing off.

When their alarm goes off in the morning, some people hit the snooze button to salvage another precious few minutes in bed and away from work. But some people pop right up, excited and eager to get to the office. The difference between these two groups – aside from the natural “morning” vs. “evening” people – often lies in where they work. At EVault, we’re proud to say that most of our employees fall into the latter category — those who can’t wait to get to the office — which is the biggest reason why EVault has just been selected as one of The Bay Area News Group’s Top Workplaces!

The award recognizes companies that create positive environments for their employees. We’re proud to say that because the selection is done solely through employee feedback, that means nearly all of our employees are as happy with us as we are with them. We understand that great work comes from employees who are motivated and enjoy coming into work every day. That’s why we do our very best to create a culture where employees have the ability to thrive both professionally and personally.

A year ago we consolidated our global headquarters from Emeryville and the South Bay to San Francisco in an effort to unify our Bay Area offices and create a cultural hub devoted not just to building great technologies but also carve a meaningful place in the local community. A big reason for our move was also about establishing a legacy and a presence beyond our own industry. Today’s workplace is bigger than just the walls and space in which you work; it also includes the community where you work and that’s especially true in San Francisco.

We believe that happy employees find satisfaction not only at work but also in the community around them. In the past year, EVault employees have volunteered in substantial numbers, both independently and through company-organized events. The response was better than we could have hoped for, and we think this award indicates that not only do EVault employees take pride in their work, but they are in-tune with our larger company values and culture.

This award is motivation for us to continue building our culture, cultivating an inspiring work environment and recruiting more great talent. If you’re interested in joining us and working for one of the top workplaces in the Bay Area, visit our careers page for details.

Dorothy.Serdar@evault.com

Employees sitting around twiddling their thumbs isn’t what you’d expect from a company operating in the competitive world of options trading. In fact it’s just the opposite – a business strategy predicated on state-of-art technologies ensuring data up time and availability.

This is what Europe-based trading company All Options found out. For years, the company relied on removable hard-disk backup for its disaster recovery requirements. As this solution began to reach maximum capacity, the organization limited backup to only critical data and archives of trading information so it could comply with local and international regulations. If traders or other staff needed to recover data, it was an inefficient and slow process.

For a company like All Options, whose business is tied to Europe’s key financial markets across slow processes equate to business depreciation. Technology drives its competitive advantage. All Options trades at exchanges including NYSE Euronext Liffe, the London Stock Exchange, Eurex, Xetra, SIX, BATS and NasdaqOMX. As such the company considers uptime of its London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt data centres and the use of current, top technologies as critical to its business success. Key to this is data restoration, which would regularly take several days to execute.

Time Consuming

“Although we were always able to recover a specific file or email, it could be a tedious and time-consuming task to locate a specific file or email,” said Bart Apeldoorn, manager of IT operations at All Options. “And when we found the data, we could never tell in advance how much time it would take to restore.”

This is where EVault backup and recovery came in. All Options sought a fast, centrally managed solution that could combine backup, disaster recovery, and archiving consistently across all of its data centres. Moreover, the solution had to be scalable and compatible with the company’s heterogeneous environment, which comprised of Windows, VMware, and Linux servers.

Advantages Realized

Since migrating to its new EVault solution, All Options used deduplication to back up 50% more data without increasing its storage footprint on the 60 servers that it currently protects with its EVault solution. The organization now uses 30 TB of backup space, which includes all its intra-company data. By replacing its former solution with disk-to-disk software from EVault, All Options has dramatically reduced the potential downtime of its IT infrastructure from several days to just hours. The EVault solution also minimizes restore times and greatly reduces All Options’ risk of missing trading opportunities on competitive stock exchanges across the globe.

It took EVault and business partner Avensus two days to complete the implementation and have each of AllOptions’ 60 servers protected.  Bare metal restore capabilities enable All Options to restore data to any piece of physical hardware in its system—and this flexibility means the company is not forced to buy unnecessary expensive new hardware when they upgrade or replace server applications. All current and future sites can be managed centrally, and capacity can be scaled up and down cost-effectively due to EVault capacity-based pricing.

With EVault, All Options is ready for the future with a business made more competitive by state-of-art technology as well as employees and customers benefiting from the availability of its critical data resources.

In my first interview with EVault, Terry Cunningham asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Dead silence… Could I honestly answer that question to him? For me, it was corporate responsibility — that was it: my dream job. The position was a perfect marriage combining my background in high tech, business management, and a lifelong passion for philanthropy.

And EVault was the perfect place to do it. When EVault first moved to our SOMA office last year, it was driven not only by a desire to be in the heart of San Francisco’s tech community, but also by the desire to give back and make a difference… even as a growing company. This was a sentiment Terry Cunningham shared with me when I first spoke with him about possibly joining EVault. I recognized immediately that giving back was something Terry valued strongly, and that he was committed to building a socially conscious company. He made it very clear that he wants EVault to not only be a profitable, successful company – but also one that does good for the world.

As a former San Francisco resident, I’ve seen firsthand the vast dichotomy between the poverty and the prosperity in the city, particularly as the tech community continues to grow. I knew that EVault’s new location combined with Terry’s leadership would position the company to give back in meaningful, ongoing ways.  The challenge is striking a balance.

That balance means creating value, and not just for the recipients of donations, but for the company itself.  Corporate responsibility programs should align with a company’s core values, be designed to be sustainable, and scalable to meet the growing and changing needs of a community.

EVault’s programs will initially focus on technology donations that help organizations leverage their social impact.    Equally important is our commitment to “be” an active part of the community where we live and work.

I’m excited to get started with the programs, and equally excited to be able to share our experiences on this blog. Stay tuned in the coming months and please feel free to share your comments and feedback.

Peggy.Weimar@evault.com

Smartphones and tablets are becoming commodities in the business world. According to a recent study by Gartner, organizations are expected to spend $718B in endpoint devices over the course of 2013 alone. These figures point to businesses that are increasingly interested in providing employees a more efficient and flexible work environment. But it also means more employees are storing corporate data on mobile devices. When viewed from the perspective of the telecom industry one finds two distinctions: hardware vendors and service providers; each has specific security concerns that a solid backup and recovery solution can address.

2012 has seen massive changes in the French telecom industry.  For example, the launch of Free Mobile, a challenger in the service provider sector, has transformed an aging landscape into an aggressively competitive industry. Through its marketing of cheap mobile plans, Free Mobile took a big chunk of the market and forced the bigger players to rethink their strategies and offer cheaper packages to keep clients from leaving. Undoubtedly it was end-users who first felt the impact of these changes but businesses weren’t far behind.  It became clear from this industry disruption that French businesses would benefit from understanding what the changes meant to them and ensure they received the services (e.g. data security) they required.

Anticipating these changes and its customer’s needs during this transformation, Bouygues Telecom, the country’s third largest service provider, partnered with EVault to develop a safe, locally based cloud backup service. A program it developed, specifically targeting SMBs with smaller budgets would be offered the same level of service as bigger ones. EVault developed a custom multi-OS server backup and recovery offering enabling SMBs to choose only one cloud-based backup and recovery service for their desktops, laptops and endpoint devices.

Bouygues Telecom chose EVault because of its long track record for safely, reliably and cost effectively protecting data. Both companies worked hand-in-hand to develop a service that would be immediately available for all French SMBs who were seeking a way to store and backup data to the cloud.

The telecom industry’s hardware vendors, selling smartphones and tablets to end users, are themselves managing increasing amounts of data on a daily basis. These include global operating systems Android and iOS, which (according to a recent article by Journal du Net) own 63.3% and 21.2%, of market share, respectively. In order to safeguard the trust its customer place on them, these businesses must ensure content stored in its datacenters is a 100% safe.  Further, as more businesses accept or encourage company data to reside on employee endpoint devices, they must prepare for the inevitability that these devices and the data on them may be stolen or lost. Having a tested endpoint protection service can ensure that when this does occur, the data is made inaccessible.

The connection was clear between the increase demanding French end users, complaining about a lack of customer service from service providers, and providers whose B2B clientele, to place a higher emphasis on client relationship management.   For its part, Bouygues Telecom seized on this several years ago through a tailored client relationship management service it put in place in 2006. As the recipient of the Best Client Relationship Management in the mobile industry every year, this was clearly a smart decision. The yearly survey to elect the Best Client Relationship Management services is directed by independent survey organizations TNS Sofres and BearingPoint. Although fewer in customers, compared to a one focused on consumers, the data being managed within B2B environments is extremely strategic.

Historically, France has put a lot of emphasis on networks, including telecommunications, which is among the country’s oldest tech industries. Bouygues Telecom’s proactive evolution ensures continuity in the network quality and adds a secure component by tackling the cloud’s major issue: ensuring all their clients’ data is safe in a French SaaS environment.

Francois.Morel@evault.com

From Germany, the company will offer its cloud-connected backup and recovery products and services through its partners, Cloud-Connected Resellers (CCR) and Cloud-Connected Service Providers (CCSP). And will also offer local partner training. As part of this expansion.  In conjunction with the office opening EVault has appointed Jean Vangramberen as its Regional Sales Director for EMEA Central.

End users in Germany are uniquely aware and sensitive to where its data is stored. In coordination with partners this new office will more effectively address the issues raised in EVault’s own research, which found that nearly half of German companies suffered from data loss last year.

Being locally based will enable EVault to develop deeper, trust based relationships with our German customers.

You can learn more about EVault Germany on our website.

EVault Germany (DACH)
Messerschmittstr. 4
80992 München
Deutschland

The University of Southern California Entertainment Technology Center, ETC@USC, is a think-tank and research center for the film industry.  It brings together senior executives from the entertainment industry and the vendor community to address topics related to the creation, distribution, and consumption of entertainment content. To grasp its longevity, influence and expectation, it was George Lucas who helped establish the ETC, back in 1993.

The center recently announced the launch of “Production in the Cloud”, a new project being convened by executives from companies, including EVault, to serve as its governing body. Most exciting for me is that the project will utilize OpenStack, the open-source cloud computing project for public and private clouds, as the platform on which to develop.

Here’s why this is so significant for Hollywood…

The advent of all-digital, film projects has required huge amount of infrastructure adaptations ranging from compute (effects, post-production, transcoding), storage (“hot”, “warm”, and “cold” storage), and networking (to move data across locations and 3rd party partners). This changes are further compounded by any work being done in remote locations. The net result can be staggering infrastructure costs.

By moving to a cloud model, the (infrastructure) costs, associated with both big and small-budget films, can be significantly reduced. This is realized through those compute, storage and networking applications, which, by leveraging the advantages of the cloud can now be provisioned on-demand, in an elastic manner, without requiring any up-front capital expenditure or an extensive IT staff.

The “Production in the Cloud” project will explore the best use of cloud and an assurance of consistency for the film industry. Various sub-projects, from the project, also include transport, data/new digital negative, metadata, framework, security, distribution, and archiving. These sub-projects will cover the entire breadth of topics from moving data to the cloud, rich metadata that might cover things ranging from the type of camera used to tracking royalty payments for particular actors, to archiving content at the tail-end of the workflow only to monetize it again.

This project is equally important for OpenStack, since it reflects its use a particular vertical industry. The core OpenStack components and APIs can be extended in a manner specific to the film industry.

As part of the “Production in the Cloud” project, we look forward to contributing.

While I’m can’t reveal our specific OpenStack plans, I would encourage those interested in working on OpenStack projects to consider joining EVault. Our OpenStack team has the energy of a start up along with the support of our parent company, Seagate.  In addition, our location, in the heart of the San Francisco’s SoMA district, offers a creative, energy-filled backdrop to be part of this exciting technology chapter.

For more information check out our careers page and email us at openstorage@evault.com.

Amar.Kapadia@evault.com

Parnassus’ top priority in a data backup plan was a comprehensive solution to protect important customer information as well as the research that informs investment decisions.  Complying with regulations like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Sarbanes-Oxley, and the Accounting Safeguards Division (ASD), SEC, NASD, and HIPPA among others, Parnassus knew their data backup solution needed to be completely complaint.

In addition to strict compliance regulations, Parnassus also had a list of goals that their solution needed to meet.  Among those is the importance that the solution can scale and grow along with the organization, a dependable fail proof recovery process while keeping their costs low.  Because the company is located in earthquake zone, Parnassus knew they needed to be prepared for the worst case scenario and have the best in cloud-connected technology.

When it came time chose a backup solution, EVault was among many others being evaluated. Parnassus quickly learned that the EVault Cloud-Connected SaaS solution easily fit into their existing infrastructure and could support their Microsoft Exchange and SQL servers.  A simple, predictable cost structure, without a per-server fee made the solution easy to budget.

In addition Parnassus knew EVault had a team of experts by their side should they need technical support, compliance documentation or make changes to their backup plan with their growing data.  Bare Metal Recovery with EVault System Restore added peace of mind that they would be able to restore their systems and data in a single pass.

EVault enjoys its working relationship with Parnassus and looks forward to continuing to scale and grow with the company’s needs.

See the full Parnassus Investments case study, here.

David A. Chapa, Chief Technology Evangelist, office of the CTO, EVault

…continued from part one

Now, where was I?  Oh yes – drawing parallels between sliced bread and data growth strategies.

With the managing of this data growth in the top 5 of everyone’s research reports it is no wonder improving data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity also remain in the top 10.  Every year it is a challenge – backup is the app IT loves to hate – that is everyone but the backup guy.

Up until about five years ago, backup applications were called “sticky apps” – in other words they are hard for customers to move away from because there is so much invested.  Not just investment in licenses, hardware and software but the data being entrusted to this backup app is probably the biggest investment.

This all began to shift in 2008 – Gartner pointed out that customers were more willing to change backup vendors if provided a compelling enough reason to shift.  ESG research echoed that sentiment and has been doing so since about 2009. Its most recent research on the subject found that 44% of IT professionals surveyed would use a new backup vendor if given the opportunity to re-architect the backup processes while 16% say they would use a 3rd party cloud service.

So, what was the catalyst?  I personally believe it was the rapid adoption of server virtualization.  ”Virtualization changes everything” was a very popular catch phrase between 2008 and 2010.  It was overused in my opinion and some became desensitized to the facts wrapped up in that statement.

Virtualization Changes Everything – or did it?
Yes, it changed how we think about server acquisition and deployment.  It changed how we think about application performance and accessibility.  It changed how we deliver to the markets we serve.  It also changed our mindset about how we protect our data and THIS, I believe, is what provided IT the freedom to choose a different approach to protecting its environments.  If you are deploying a new platform and this platform is destined to be spread out across your entire organization, it makes perfectly good sense to reconsider how things are being done today.  This is what made the traditional backup applications much less sticky but data protection as a function is not going away – again I believe it will always be foundational to whatever new technology is introduced but given all the pressures on IT today the old way of doing things (ie. old backup apps) just won’t keep up.

Wrap Up
With more and more data to protect, archive and manage it seems very natural to see this converged model surface between cloud, virtualization and data protection.  The fact that 88% of companies are driving towards the cloud due to the economic climate says a lot for the future of cloud, cloud services and cloud storage.  With only 56% saying they trust their data to the cloud, it means there is still a lot more work for us to educate the market about what to look for in a cloud service provider and why data security is so important.

As pioneers in the cloud backup space, we at EVault are pretty happy to see this convergence happening.  We’ve been doing this for more than 15 years and currently manage over 95PB of data in our cloud.  Our customers know the value of using EVault, if you don’t then perhaps check out our website, leave a comment here or follow us on twitter (@EVault, @davidchapa).  Our solutions range depending on your specific needs.

EVault Data Protection Software
Private or Hybrid Cloud ready solution (D2D)

EVault SaaS
No on premise equipment. (D2C)
Fully managed solution

EVault Endpoint Protection
Remote Users/BYOD protection (D2C)
Ensures corporate control

EVault Offsite Replication
Hybrid Cloud Protection (D2D2C)

EVault Cloud DR Services
Extension of our data protection services (D2D2CDR)
Documented disaster recovery SLA
Quick recovery of business critical servers

When it comes to modernizing your data protection solution, we may just be the best thing since sliced bread.

-Chapa signing off