Speakers:

Mike Laverick, Author of “Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager”
Mornay Van Der Walt, Director, Technical Marketing, VMware

Tags: Mike Laverick, Site Recovery, VMware

Speaker:
Jon Bock, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, VMware

Tags: VMware, Jon Bock, virtualization, disaster recovery

Speaker:
Jon Bock, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, VMware

Tags: Disaster Recovery, enterprise datacenter, VMware, Virtualization, Disaster Recovery Solutions, Jon Bock

Intel, virtualization, chip chat, disaster recovery, workload balancing

Tags: Intel, virtualization, chip chat, disaster recovery, workload balancing

Tyrone Pike, President and CEO of Cemaphore, talks with Brad Baldwin about defining the right mix of enterprise-class features for small and medium businesses. Pike also talks about challenges and best practices for email continuity and the hole he sees in the market to provide the same service to companies with just a few mailboxes.

SMBs can leverage Cemaphore MailShadow for as few as 25 up to as many as 50,000 mailboxes. Mail can fail over to Cemaphore within minutes of an outage to keep email up and running. Cemaphore also supports mobile devices that we’ve all come to rely on when traveling. When organizations migrate or upgrade to a new version of Exchange, MailShadow helps out. Cemaphore has built a deep expertise in Microsoft Exchange transaction technology, including being Microsoft’s first Reference Licensee of the Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol specification (formerly MAPI).

Tags: Cemaphore, Content Management, disaster recovery, email, Email Continuity, Microsoft Exchange, SMB

Transforming the data center requires understanding the underlying domains: facility, network, server, storage and how security interacts with manageability and other technology. The security architect has to evolve plans for business continuity and disaster recovery, as well as jump into emerging threat and risk arenas like Web application security. Facilities monitoring and management and energy savings require understanding and balancing customer service levels with the need to pinpoint where, when and how much compute power is needed, and migrating workloads accordingly. Virtualization is another game-changer in the data center, increasing capacity and manageability while decreasing energy consumption.

Alan Ross comes to enterprise architecture from an unconventional background. He holds a number of patents, has worked with electrorheological fluids to change the behavior of automotive dampers, and hopes someday to be part of future innovations in energy efficiency, photovoltaics and photolytics.

Blogs IT@Intel

Some images courtesy of:
Andrew Wales, Gisela Francisco, John Trainor, Koshy Koshy, Refracted Moments, Les Chatfield and Robin Hutton via Attribution 2.0 Generic; Bill Stilwell, Jamie Beverly, Craig Rodway, Fod Tzellos, Eric Schmuttenmaer, Stan Wiechers, gailf548, Andy Melton, Dawn Endico amd Mike Lowell via Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic; Hans Splinter via Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic

Tags: storage capacity, IT@Intel, Alan Ross, virtualization, data center, Alan Ross, enterprise architecture, electrorheological fluids, energy efficiency

Now more then ever, disaster recovery is about the full recovery of business resumption activities and the technology infrastructure. The most important element for disaster recovery is being able to replicate a production facility into a remote facility. Facilities and strategy are the two cornerstones for any disaster recovery plan.

In recent years, companies have been actively developing two data centers to deal with disasters. One center is dedicated to day-to-day activities and the other specializes in disaster recovery. BearingPoint has been diligently working to develop a plan that utilizes both centers on a day-to-day basis so that in the event of a disaster, only 50% of the workflow is affected.

Tags: BearingPoint, Daryouche Behboudi, disaster recovery

Tags: Jennifer Ellard, Dan Lamorena, High Availability, Disaster Recovery

How does one develop a DR plan? A solid mix of foundational research and strategic alternatives help outline plans which should include emergency response and mission critical process continuity, technology recovery, business resumption, and human capital continuity.

In addition, the testing of DR plans is not just about passing; it’s about finding things that are wrong and readjusting the plan accordingly. This must be organization-wide, real-life testing.

Tags: BearingPoint, Andy Szuberla

Tags: remote access, security, Peter Silva, F5 Networks, disaster recovery

Tags: F5, Ken Salchow, Disaster Recovery, disaster preparedness

Part one here.

Transcript:
Host: Michael Johnson - PodTech
Guest: Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks

Michael Johnson - PodTech
This is Part 2, in our discussion with F5 Networks’ Kevin Hohenbrink, talking about Data Replication, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity and how F5 Networks’ WANJet product can help?

Now, one term that’s floating out there is business impact analysis. Now, how is this important to the overall Business Continuity and the Disaster Recovery Plan?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, an enterprise to undertake a business impact analysis to map their dependencies between critical business operations and the people resources applications and physical IT assets that they rely upon. In today’s environments, business process rely on multiple integrated applications, database and storage systems and so on. So, in order to restore a business process in the event of a disruption, you have to be certain replicating and coordinating the recovery of all these dependent applications. When you’re defining RTO and RPO application by application and selectively replicating data, it could mean, you’re only going to get a partial restoration of your business process.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
One of the other terms that’s out there, Kevin, it’s the term Consolidation. Now, how does this relate to protecting sites that you’ve got, say in remote areas? A lot of businesses right now have data centers, information applications and people information out in remote centers, especially as we’re expanding across greater and greater areas with globalization. How does Consolidation work?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, so data loss at remote sites is currently a huge risk exposure for most enterprise customers. Leveraging existing investment and existing data centers on recovery sites to offer Consolidation Backup Solutions from remote sites where centralized facility is critical. So, Consolidation will help ensure the backups to run regularly and very successfully. They’ve improved the manageability with their central administrators by providing visibility into remote site data center protection and potentially the ability to remotely configure and manage this protection, all with the goal of enabling their remote office to recover from the localized disaster.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
So, business maybe thinking about — maybe putting in some additional bandwidth to support those remote sites that we’ve been talking about or maybe improve some of the performances, some of their existing Data Replication Technologies or expand them as well. When is it important for a business with this kind of set up, to consider WAN Optimization and the products that are out there for it? What kinds of things should they look at and what’s an important consideration?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, so when you’re considering a WAN Optimization Solution, an important aspect of the WANJet appliance is that F5 has already taken the time and made the investment to test the interoperability of WANJet appliances with independent software vendors, storage vendors and storage network vendors like EMC and Double-Take. We’ve gone to the trouble of creating case studies in customer reference and it can provide customer references to prove out its capabilities and of course its intended benefits to our interested customers.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Okay, so you have some folks that are looking at their networks. What kinds of things should they be considering in designing that network when they are looking at a Disaster Recovery Preparedness Plan?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
To achieve the desired RTO and your RPO with the greatest possible distance between the sites, enterprises are often going to design multi-site disaster recovery configurations to combine synchronous, asynchronous or even batch or schedule replication technologies. Site preparation is crucial because enterprises need locate their recovery site far enough away to escape the likeliest of local and regional threats, such as natural and man-made disasters. Synchronous Replication ensures the zero data loss because technically speaking, it does not return a right acknowledgment to their application until the data is being run to their recovery site. So, as a result, Synchronous Replication requires high-bandwidth, very low latency between the data centers in a metro area and the distance is no more than a 150kms apart.

Asynchronous on the other hand are typically deployed for long distances. With Asynchronous Replication the primary and secondary sites will be slightly out of sink and there’s some chance of data loss in the event of a disaster or a business disruption. However, applications are not forced to wait for the remote site to confirm a right acknowledgment before processing can continue and that’s the difference between those two.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
So, when companies are looking at the idea of data replication today, what are some main factors that are challenging folks and how can they be solved?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, so some of the key network challenges are, the expanding distance between DR sites. RPOs and RTOs are decreasing and a larger volume of data is needed to be replicated and of course TCP is becoming more common for all applications. This typically results in the WAN being seriously impeded from a performance perspective for it’s replication solution. So, how we’re going to resolve this? Well, you’re not going to ask the customer to replicate lost data, that’s not going to happen. Should the customer release more bandwidth? Well, an option, but it’s not a desirable choice, as this represents — as we talked about earlier, 20-30% of cost for data replication and it’s also recurring cost monthly. Accelerating a traffic — well, this is the most cost-effective method and this is what drives a solution like WANJet. Prioritizing the data replication traffic and guaranteeing bandwidth. This is what we talked about the quality of service capability of WANJet. This protects the traffic from WAN congestion or latency concerns.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Can you tell me some of the factors, WANJets got operate in the real world too. So, what would be some factors that would affect the ability of a WANJet to accelerate that replication traffic?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, so the factors you are going to need to understand are the amount of repetition in data, even at the byte level, amount of compressible capability in the data. IE text is easily compressible, images are less, so all right. Another factor is the amount of different types of traffic competing for the same bandwidth. This requires WANJet to begin enforcing bandwidth guarantees which we can significantly improve performance of the important traffic at the expense of less important traffic. As I’d alluded to you before about the quality service capability.

Then the variability of data, when traffic is highly variable, congestion levels that would otherwise bring a replication process to halt, can now be prevented using bandwidth allocation because now we’re guaranteeing the bandwidth to that replication application.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Okay, so tell me your company installs the WANJet appliance, what would be some measurable benefits that they could expect to see in their data replication strategy right away?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, so F5 has several customers who have deployed WANJet with industry leading storage replication vendors like EMC, Symmetric Solution and Double-Take. Some of the measurable benefits we’ve found were — doing our testing was the customers can meet their RPOs and RTOs without upgrading bandwidth or data replication solution infrastructure and they were able to accelerate replication traffic as much anywhere from five-ten times faster. They also were able to utilize 70% to 90% less bandwidth because we guaranteed the bandwidth and we prioritized for data replication applications over non-data replication traffic. So, you were able to guarantee the bandwidth for your data replication traffic because you can do the prioritization.

You’re also able to mitigate the total effective latency, affecting the replication process. We also enable them in their networks to adopt dynamically to data replication applications needs and congestion. We’re also it was kind of cool it was that we move more of the control of RAM resources into the hands of the storage team to depend on it and typically they have never had that kind of control or visibility, and then lastly, we were able to encrypt all traffic using SSL and of course this is a optional benefit on all WANJets.

Customers found that they can reduce the cost of meeting these RPOs by using a fraction of the bandwidth to replicate the same data, we were also able to provide a comprehensive view of WAN performance matrix and bottleneck so we could tell them who are the trouble spots were and then we were able to reduce the tangible and intangible cause to troubleshooting which sort of raises a big question for people. Back to the customers don’t have to incur the cost of bringing out the storage replication vendor on site.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Well, Kevin you gave a lot of information here today. Is there a Website that folks can go to at F5 Networks or a particular place so they can go to find out little bit more about the WANJet Optimization Product.

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, you’re going to go to F5’s new Website www.f5.com under products and you’ll search for WANJet and there is plenty of great white papers on the technology, white papers on our data replication, interoperability story with companies like Double-Take and EMC.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Okay, so that’s www.f5.com, look under products it will we search for WANJet.Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
That’s correct

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Alright, Kevin Hohenbrink is the Product Manager for the optimization product WANJet from F5 Networks, it’s been a fascinating conversation Kevin, and hope to continue this as well as we explore more ideas about how to really make businesses and disaster recovery and threats to business and all of that easier through these types of products and it’s been great talking with you today on the Podcast.

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Well, thank you very much.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Kevin Hohenbrink, F5 Networks, disaster recovery, WANJet

Part two here.

Transcript:

Host: Michael Johnson – PodTech
Guest: Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks

Michael Johnson – PodTech
This is Michael Johnson and we have on the line with us today Kevin Hohenbrink who is the optimization product manager for the product WANJet over at F5 Networks. So welcome to the podcast, Kevin.

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Well thank you.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Now today we’re going to talk about some interesting things that have to do with how a business runs. We are going to talk about Disaster Recovery and Continuity. Now these are couple of terms that we hear are RTO and RPO and its importance to the Continuity Disaster Recovery Plan. Let us define what those terms are and explain how that works in this picture.

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
So the two terms RTO and RPO, Recovery Time Objective and I’m going to use some sort of industry definitions that are pretty accepted by everybody. This is the maximum viable downtime after an outage for recovering systems, applications and functions. RTO provides the basis for developing cost effective recovery strategies and effectively getting the resources up and working again and implementing these recovery strategies during a disaster situation. Typically companies will measure in minutes to hours the downtime, their RTO and RPO. There was a recent study done by Forrester that talks about – in the event of a primary data center site failure, that 45% of North American respondents and 47% of European respondents recover in five hours or less. However, only a small percentage of those respondents, 8% North America and 7% European Theater could measure their recovery time in 120 minutes or less. Recovery point objective as per the industry standard definition, defines how current or fresh the data is after a disaster. Recovery point objective, the RPO, is really the earliest point in time which systems and data must be recovered after an outage. RPO typically defines maximum amount of data that the organization is willing to sacrifice after a disaster. And the zero RPO business continuity solution can survive a disaster without any loss of data and that typically tends to be very expensive. Another data point from a Forrester study — the same Forrester study, in the event of a primary data center site failure there was as much as 55% of North American respondents and 59% of European respondents. They would lose about five hours of data or less. 28% of the North American respondents and 27% of the European respondents could measure their data loss in less than 120 minutes. So when you put these two together RTO and RPO, they provide a measurable target for business continuity and Disaster Recovery Solutions. At any time you can improve the RTO and RPO, you got to increase your investment in networking and storage technologies as a result. The physical distance between your data center is typically and how well your applications tolerate network latency affect how close you’re going to get to zero RPO. This is why you should limit your RTO and RPO to whatever levels your organization can tolerate from a cost perspective.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Well let’s talk a little bit talk about that cost and what’s the impact of the WAN on those recovery objectives when we talk about that distance and how far out your network goes?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Okay. So a comprehensive Disaster Recovery Solution typically requires an investment, multiple hardened (ph) recovery sites, duplicating the IT assets such as your servers and your storage arrays, your networking equipment and you typically do it at all these sites and then having the replication software and the necessary bandwidth between these sites. Typically, the cost of bandwidth is often a significant component of the cost of Disaster Recovery Solutions that rely on data replication between these sites. There was a Forrester survey that said 25% of North American enterprises and 26% of the European enterprises reported that cost of bandwidth was representing between 20 and 30 percent of the total cost of data replication and again these are recurring monthly costs.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Let’s talk a little bit more about that network — the idea of the transport network. How does that affect your recovery objectives in the long run?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
So the amount of bandwidth and the type of network transport selected whether it’s Wavelength Sonic Ethernet or IP is really the key to achieving desired recovery objectives. Limiting the impact and latency to the business applications and increasing the distance between the sites. WAN connectivity issues such as latency, reliability limit to service options and limited bandwidth may make significant impacts in improving recovery objectives and we’re going to talk more about this as we go through this, I’m sure.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Let’s talk a little bit more about some of those characteristics and break that down a little bit more because I think it’s — we kind of went over it kind of quickly but I think they’re pretty important points.

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Sure. So the inherent characteristics you are going to find on a WAN network are latency, this is typically caused by limits to the speed of light over distance. You are going to have packet loss, caused by signal degradation over the network medium, over saturating network links, corrupting packets, rejected in transit or faulty network hardware. Network congestion, a big key point — excessive, lots of data on the network slows overall transmission speed kind of like too many cars on the freeway. Actual bandwidth is not the expected bandwidth often due to a combination of the factors listed above, whether its latency, packet loss or network congestion and of course last is expensive bandwidth. Large pipes can incur significant monthly costs. Unfortunately, such factors as these can often cripple a D R plan. WAN links are often subject to variable congestion caused by other application traffic, file transfers, even possibly other migration or recovery activities. This means your RPO and RTO that are met in minutes, can now be completely unobtainable the next minute due to congestion. So heavy latency do perhaps to extended distances can prevent meeting RPOs and RTOs irrespective of how much bandwidth is used. So adding more bandwidth doesn’t always solve all of your problems.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay and now when people think about networks going down, sometimes they think okay, you know it is time we take a coffee break and you know, that’s kind of what it is but its — we’re talking a lot more stuff is on the table here besides this lost revenue, just things going down. What are some other key factors that are you know going to fuel that need to really improve your recovery capabilities of your business?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Sure. So it’s also the cost associated with permanent customer loss and the ability of competitors to gain market share. So aside from the cost of downtime, additional drivers feeling the need to improve recovery capabilities are going to include increased risk fiduciary responsibilities to your shareholders, competitiveness in the market and of course regulatory like SOX and HIPAA are additional legal drivers. So based on recent events especially here in North America including terrorist attacks, blackouts, earthquakes, hurricanes wildfires and on and on, the perceived risk level is increasing among enterprises. So and additionally due to a significant number of corporate scandals that led to such government oversight and regulatory Sarbanes-Oxley, enterprises that operate in the business environment have increased fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, partners and customers and even their own employees.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay, now F5 is in the network business. Is there a WAN optimization appliance solution that you have?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Absolutely. The WAN optimization solution from F5 is the WANJet product. F5’s WANJet is an appliance-based solution that uses compression, acceleration technologies to dramatically improve the speed of application traffic over the WAN. WANJet accelerates a wide variety of application traffic types including data replication which is the focus of this discussion, file transfer, email client/server applications and others. WANJet also has some unique features that enable bandwidth to be efficiently allocated amongst different applications, we call it our quality of service, and thereby ensuring that the most critical traffic receives the priority access to the valuable bandwidth. We buy the bandwidth in lot of cases specifically for a particular application, you want to make sure that that application gets its bandwidth.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay, so can WAN acceleration appliances like this actually help in achieving that goal that we were talking about before, that zero RPO?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Yes. WANJet appliances help to improve throughput. They also mitigate latency of existing networks through such techniques as this compression, our TDR data reduction and transport protocol acceleration. Often the cost of deploying a WANJet appliance at each end of the link is less expensive than the cost of increasing bandwidth. Typically, these appliances can be particularly helpful for enterprises that want to use replication or remote backup between sites, with limited bandwidth to the corporate data center.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
So how is WANJet going to work in that formula, to mitigate that latency?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
In situations where the WAN link, WAN is the bottleneck, WANJet can improve the performance of synchronous and asynchronous replication solutions which in turn can mitigate application latency and its performance impacts on applications.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay. Now you also have this situation that, you know that enterprises that have some replications solutions in place between their data centers and other sites can the WANJet support replication of more data with existing bandwidth as opposed to say adding more, you know?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Yeah, absolutely. Traditionally business applications like ERP, SCM, CRM as well as messaging and collaborative applications such as email — these are going to continue to grow steadily each year. These are often the very applications that are supportive with remote replication. The WANJet appliance can help enterprises support to continue replication of these applications with existing bandwidth. WANJet uses a QoS technique to guarantee and prioritize data replication over non-data replication applications as we just mentioned.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Can it also enable the extending replication of other applications as well?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Yeah. Do the cost replication — most enterprises are very selective about which applications they replicate and which ones they don’t. Usually they limit it to mission critical apps. Today it’s no longer a one-to-one relationship between a business process and application. Business processes now rely on multiple applications and to restore the entire process that means that they’re going to have to coordinate the recovery of the multiple apps. So customers are going to be very pleased to know that these apps that were once deemed only business critical as opposed to mission critical also require replication to another site.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
That was F5 networks Kevin Hohenbrink. This has been the first of a two-part series on data replication, disaster recovery and business continuity. Tune in next time right here on PodTech for Part two of our conversation with Kevin Hohenbrink.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Kevin Hohenbrink, F5 Networks, WANJet

Transcript:
Host: Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Guest: Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Welcome to this edition of Thought Leaders, where we bring you candid conversations with the people whose research and writing are guiding both the buyers and suppliers of IT Solution. I’m Jim Leach. Today we are joined by Andy Schroepfer, President and Founder of Tier 1 Research. Andy is unique in market research field in that he is part Wall Street analyst and part IT Industry analyst. He applies his experience on Wall Street through his research and how IT companies are turning customer solution into shareholder value. Thanks for joining us on Thought Leaders Andy.

Andrew Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Hey, happy to be here, thanks for having me.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Can you put on your Wall Street Analyst hat first and give our listeners your view on the hosting industry? How big is it? How do you segment it? Where are the growth areas?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Sure. Well, from the Wall Street perspective, there were a ton of people that got burned back in the Internet bubble that looked at Exodus as the be-all-end-all company in the hosting sector and then there was Acomi and all these other companies that had monstrous billion dollar valuations, and obviously those all came down in fact, to zero to something probably above zero.

So, in a couple of years that ensued since then, it was tough for people to really understand why would I go back to that industry, it was part of the bubble. And fortunately now, we’ve had a five year - half a decade separation to where people can come back and revisit these.

So, that’s because of the Web 2.0 movement that gives a lot of prospects. BusinessWeek article from a couple of weeks ago; we have a $12 billion industry in hosting that people still don’t necessarily know how to look at. There is two ways to look at it. One is the old way which is the — there is data centers, and that’s a co-location business. There’s people with dedicated hosting that actually own the gear and it’s actually a single device or multiple single devices for specific a client. Then there is shared infrastructure; shared infrastructure used to just be defined as shared hosting, but now as you look, it includes utility computing and virtualized hosting. That’s the old way to look at it.

The form factor — way to look at it is not how we believe investors would want anyone to look at it. The new way should be, who is the buyer of the services that are being sold in this $12 billion hosting industry; it’s the consumer which buys blog services, media publishing, and sharing tools; it’s the small business that buys different software, the service applications, or host their own version of an appliance as an application. Then there’s large enterprises that have big needs for disaster recovery, big needs for facilities, for lots of their analyst applications.

So, the right way to look at it is by customer type that’s buying; and that’s how we are starting to segment our industry at least, in our revenue view of this $12 billion sector. But now that’s the right way to look at it, as people are starting to understand that and understand how these business models are working. The investors have started to come back, and most of the stocks in this sector that are public, and what we’ve seen are doubling over the last year, or at least they are more formalization in how their capital structures worked. So, I think investors have more of a reason to come back to this sector as well as a healthier sector to come back to.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Very interesting; so let’s dig into those buyer segments a little bit, the consumers, small business and large enterprises. Where are the growth areas in those segments, are they all growing at about the same rate or are some of the areas hotter than others?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
The consumer sector interestingly, is actually being driven by free services, which are advertising based. So, it’s actually a different revenue model than people buying actually for the services whether it’s a blog service, whether it’s a shared hosting account, whether it’s an email account.

So that business model is completely different and there’s tremendous growth in online advertising because of the benefits that you can have from better targeting who you are trying to reach with your ad. As you get into the small business, those companies are finally understanding that they can take advantage of the applications that larger enterprises have used because they can buy them in a ‘software as a service’ delivery model, which gives it a per user, per seat, per month, pricing structure, and lets it be approachable by both the user as well as the buyer from the small business.

So that’s the biggest growth area as it relates to hosting. The large enterprise has already decided whether they’re going to do something in-house or whether they are going to do it on an outsourced basis. That usually has a five year cyclical nature and I think we are coming back to the marketplace — we are coming back to the part in that cycle, where the enterprises want to be outsourcing more. And interestingly the dynamic that’s hitting at the same time now is the availability of so many enterprise applications through this ‘software as a service’ model, which is causing enterprises to need less data center space in some cases, or if their delivery model is to be a ‘software as a service’ company, a lot of these companies are taking on more infrastructure.

So there’s as many companies growing huge in a large enterprise as it relates to their hosting needs, as there are companies who have a significantly less need. So a good large enterprise is probably the slowest growth sector but it’s more about who you’re targeting that large enterprise group.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
So the buyers of Web hosting services are starting to segment themselves into these different categories of consumer and small business, large enterprises. Are you also seeing a similar type of segmentation in the Web hosting providers? Are they trying to deliver different types of services and to meet the needs of these different segments?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Yes, that’s a great question. It’s been the changeover from the seller having the power to the buyer having the power; and there’s equally as many companies that get this change, to the companies that don’t. So, the companies that get this change are offering so many services on a needed basis, or on a pre-user basis; that’s how the buyers are interested in buying right now. As you go down across those different segments from large enterprise down to consumer, the consumer is becoming so used to having free services, and they are happy to understand that advertisements are what’s allowing them to get that service for free.

You no longer have people interested in buying a software package at ‘Best Buy’ or ‘Circuit City’ or having them download software from the Web, you’re wanting them to just be able to drive right in and use the service and pay for it; then again, as you go up into the small business and large enterprise to be able to use that and pay for that on a pre-user basis, and above and beyond that the ones who really get this change that’s happened, understand that you are personalizing and verticalizing their offerings; so, not just offering a utility computing platform but tailoring it towards a particular vertical market such as financial services or retail or healthcare.

Whatever the application is that’s going to reside on top of an infrastructure, it’s going to have a better growth story behind it and a better traction and adoption if it’s tailored towards this specific vertical market. Those are the companies who really get what’s going on right now.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Or in a sense that the consumer segment is driving the business segment; and from an IT supplier perspective, a number of the biggest hosting companies, firms like IBM, EDS, big telcos like AT&T and Verizon, they grew up in the business sector. Are firms like those big traditional outsourcers going to have trouble surviving in this new market? Do they have to regroup?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
They definitely need to regroup. I wouldn’t go as far as to say they have a problem surviving. I hope a lot of these mega-companies lay off a lot of people that hopefully go and start a lot of new interesting entrepreneurial companies. The entire reason that the consumer is driving the innovations in the enterprise services world is that it’s easier to adopt something that’s free. I mean you can get mass adoption of something that’s free, and you get a lot of people that battle-test different applications that are online.

So is Microsoft ready to offer their entire Office suite in an online format yet? Sure they’re probably ready, but will they? They won’t until they have to. Unfortunately, there’s companies from Google all the way on down to the companies like Zoho that are launching spreadsheets and word processing documents online, and making that something that Microsoft will have to react to; same thing can be said for the outsourcers on your question. If these services are geared towards being tuned with expensive consultants and expensive engagements, it’s not necessary that that’s wrong, there’s the need for that personalization.

They’re using the tools that have been battle-tested in the consumer world. You are able to more quickly and easily adopt, customize, personalize, and verticalize all these applications and the enterprises outside do think that IBM is at a disadvantage as a company, but hopefully the IBMs, EDSs, the CSEs will use to their advantage the divisions that are focused on looking at those technologies to their advantage for their enterprise accounts. So again, I wouldn’t go as far as to say they’re in trouble; I would go as far as to say they are disadvantaged relative to companies that do get to work closer to both the cutting edge consumer side as well as the small business side.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Let’s talk a little about the startups that you alluded to, that it might start emerging over time. I know you keep an eye on that part of the marketplace. Have you seen anything interesting with the startups that you think could have a big impact on the broader Web hosting industry?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Yeah, I think social networking is essentially the heart of what the Web 2.0 movement stands for; it’s the ability for anyone to interact with any content and share it with anyone that they want to, in any format that they want to. Whatever website you might go to, whatever application you might interact with, it should afford you the opportunity to use that in a community fashion whether it’s reading a news article online, whether it’s buying a product online, whether it’s writing a blog entry online; everything that you might do is something that should be something that can exist in a social network.

So, whether it’s the social network software makers themselves that actually pioneer this into all of the enterprise applications is yet to be seen - kind of like business analytics, that’s the sector that still exists today with business objects and a lot of mega companies still – essentially analytics need to be applied to every application. We think social networking is the latest thing out of the startup movement and needs to be applied to almost every website, every application that exists.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
It’s always a pleasure to get a chance to spend some time and talk with you Andy, I really appreciate you being a part of Thought Leaders. Let me asked you one last question.

Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research
Sure.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
There has been a lot of press coverage recently about an impending battle between Microsoft and Google. Are the battle lines really being drawn between these two companies, and if they are, who’s going to win and what will it mean for the IT industry?

Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research
When the company is afforded evaluation like Google has, and is simultaneously able to spend increasingly mega amounts of money and be rewarded for that, that’s a hard monster for anyone to compete with. Fortunately, there are a couple players in the world like Microsoft that have dollars that they can go and compete.

So, Microsoft committed a couple billion extra dollars in this current year to go build the platform to compete. But what’s really happening is, who can build up a complete platform that anyone in the world can plug an application into and be able to like Google, help monetize that in return for access to this monster platform. Microsoft, I think is going to do the same thing; so, I guess, I do believe they are at battle completely and wholly. Do I think Microsoft has the ability to win? They have the chance to win, but this is Google’s game to lose at this point. The longer the market continues to afford Google, evaluation, to the extent that they have it for putting together this monstrosity of the computing platform, it will become almost untouchable.

So, everyone in the world that wants to have an application — and again, this comes back to the hosting sector and say, if I wanted — do I want to go build my own complete resource, or do I want to potentially tap that into a Microsoft platform or a Google platform or a Yahoo platform or an Amazon - eBay could, on down the line. Fortunately, the hosting companies that get this, again are offering utility computing, so you can hopefully tap into an unlimited amount of resource, so you can serve all of the people that want to come visit your site. But specific to Google and Microsoft if I had to pick a winner, I’m still picking Google at this point, but if you had to compete against anybody - if I’m Google, I don’t want to compete against Microsoft, if I’m Microsoft I don’t want to compete against Google; its going to be an interesting battle. Google’s my pick for the winner right now.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Thanks again to Andy Schroepfer, President and Founder, Tier 1 Research, and thanks to you, our listeners for joining us on this edition of Thought Leaders.

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Tags: Thought Leaders, SAVVIS, Andy Schroepfer, Tier 1 Research

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Tags: Stephanie Balarous, Forrester, Laurel Burton, Qwest

Samuel Holtzman III, President and CEO, LifeGift Organ Donation Center, Charley Ballmer, Solutions Architect, CompuCom.

More information at:
Symantec.com

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Tags: Symantec, Samuel Holtzman, LifeGift, Symantec

NetApp is also a leader in corporate blogging with one of the founders David Hitz blogging hard for the company.. Now NetApp is podcasting. Dave blogs about his trip with Kevin Brown to DC which was a pretext to this announcement.

Full Transcript for the NetApp Podcast Announcement:

Host: John Furrier, Founder PodTech.net
Guest: Kevin Brown, VP of Marketing, Decru a Network Appliance Company

John Furrier: Welcome to the PodTech.net Infotalk series. We are here at the Network Appliance headquarters with Kevin Brown the Vice President of Marketing here at NetApp in charge of marketing at Decru.

John Furrier: Welcome to the podcast.

Kevin Brown: Thanks.

John Furrier: Network Appliance has been a leader for years in pioneering storage … storage area network among other technologies. Now you guys are moving into a new area extending the pioneering work with data encryption and intersecting in security. Talk about what you guys are announcing today.

Kevin Brown: Yeah that’s right. If you look at NetApp’s history, it has really grown up from an innovator in mass storage to a unified storage platform that could handle multi protocols in the same appliance to a whole storage system company with replication and disaster recovery. There are a lot of innovations around how do you create snapshots of data and comply with regulations Now, what customers are pushing for is expansion of that into the next level up, into data management. It’s not just can you store the data, but can you really manage it? Part and parcel of data management today is security. This is one of the top topics that everyone in the federal government to Wall Street to the entire Fortune 500… Fortune 2000 are really looking at as a priority. Building security into data management; that is where the innovation is. That is where the acquisition of Decru has played in over the last few months.

John Furrier: The world is changing. Everyone talks about how the environment is changing…with security. Everyone is always connected…always on. There is huge talk about security. You were with Decru which recently was purchased by NetApps this past summer. Talk about what Decru is doing and how that fit into NetApp’s plans.

Kevin Brown: Sure, NetApps had a number of security initiatives in the past around the NetCash product line for gateway access… for Internet access and security and a number of native security features. The Decru acquisition brings in some expertise around encryption, around access control, authentication … some of the tightly bound features that are being injected into the storage networks themselves. One of the things that was unique about Decru is we took some thing that was relatively hard and slow…encryption and it was very difficult to employ in an enterprise type of an environment. Much like NetApp has done over the past few years, we did a lot to simplify and remove the tradeoffs. What used to be slow, invasive and difficult we’ve taken and made it really fast. We made it very easy. We tried to simplify and make it very robust…taking something that’s been hard to do, for enterprises, and simplifying that to address a major business need.

John Furrier: Storage is getting bigger. Everyone is storing more photos, more podcasts; these files are getting bigger. People are always connected. Storage is part of the critical infrastructure. From a security standpoint what did Decru do in terms of speed? What other things fit into, from a user perspective, where the security (for enterprise) what this means?

Kevin Brown: Sure. If you look at the history of storage it started out as direct attached … a little disk drive attached to a server. Over the last few years, to handle the explosion of data, as you mentioned data has increasingly been centralized into very large pools of shared data, and now increasingly being replicated… so there are multiple copies of that data. You take all your eggs and you put them in one basket and you make eight copies of that basket for disaster recovery and for information sharing and compliance. All of a sudden, what used to be little pools of data which were relatively separate are now all in the same basket. From a security perspective, this is a real problem. It gives you benefits in terms of not losing your data. There is a dilemma you want to make copies so you don’t lose it if there is a hurricane or some other type of disaster. You’ve got to have copies. But the more copies you make, the more risky it is in terms of theft. What Decru has come in with is a turnkey appliance, a piece of hardware very much like NetApp storage. We sit in the middle of the data path, and we can encrypt selectively everything at wire speed. Our new box that we just launched, our 10 port box, we are doing a total of 10 Gb/second of throughput in single box. These are very, very fast pieces of hardware. We can do it invisibly without changing any of your existing infrastructure or workflow. It’s taking something that is very hard and applying military grade security. We are used on the battle field today by the military. Those same boxes are now being plugged into credit unions to protect your credit card number.

John Furrier: That’s unbelievable. Basically, it evolves to… First, it was secure your network. Now everyone is always connected. Now the next phase is secure your data. It is obviously key.

Kevin Brown: It’s a good observation. Where security started, ten years ago you would telnet to each others computers over the Internet. It was totally cool. People started to realize there are a lot of threats over the Internet. So today if you plug in a network without a firewall you are fired. Things start as a good idea maybe for the military or banks, but then really quickly move into best practices. Data encryption. If you look at data in flight, like shopping on the Internet, you wouldn’t shop on a site that didn’t have a secure webserver or Https. You just probably wouldn’t do it, because you would be concerned about your credit card. How much more so for the company that is storing 14 million credit cards in a server and they are sitting there all in clear text…readable formats? That is just the way the storage grew up. You start from these little pools of data. They never changed the formats. What we’re doing is we are trying to change that, so that you have layers of defense. So that whether you are a bank or an HMO or the government or a manufacturing company…everyone has secret data that they are trying to protect. As you look at the layered defenses… one sort of tongue and cheek comment from our team was, “What do you call a firewall with a lot of holes punched in it to work from home and to work with partners? That’s called a router.

John Furrier: It’s unbelievable; you have to really protect that data. You can’t side load anymore. Everything is about complete ubiquity in terms of access. Let’s talk about the announcement. You are announcing at NetApp today a new initiative. Talk about the new initiative you are doing. It is called Uncompromised Security.

Kevin Brown: What we are trying to do is to put a wrapper around all of the different initiatives and product announcements and so forth that we have within the company so that people understand the direction and where we are going and the commitment that we are making to the customers. I just came back from Wall Street. Some of biggest customers just came back from a meeting with a lot of the Fortune 500…a meeting on Capitol Hill with legislatures. There is a real concern about we need the tech vendors to make a real commitment to securing data, to building security into their systems. We are responding with is, really, that commitment of, “we are going to build products, we are going to partner with other companies to make it all work, we are going to organize ourselves in a way that we can very quickly integrate in this area.” There is a pretty holistic push. There are a number of products, for example, which really come with substance today. For instance, NetCash product for the Internet access, gateway security, the Decru products that we are shipping today many, many large customers using that in production today. Iron Mountain, for example just announced that they are using it for all their data and they’ve now recommended to all 40,000 of their customers that they ought to encrypt data before giving it to the courier. We are making a pretty big push around the technology itself and also all of the business backing. There is no one product that is a silver bullet. This is a sustained initiative. What our customers told us is it is important for our vendors that we rely on to invest in us.

John Furrier: You guys are using your leadership position as a company to go out and spearhead… pulling together the policy side and the business side… leading the charge of what the policy should be for data security.

Kevin Brown: Yes that’s right. And we have been serving as a resource for Congress, who is starting to look at these issues that involve technology. We have been asked. We have met with various Congress People and their staffs, to talk over these issues, to make sure that we can help streamline legislations and regulations for companies, so that it makes sense for them. We can do all the things that are needed to protect consumer data as well.

John Furrier: You mentioned in your press release, it states, “The accepted definition of acceptable security is alarmingly weak.” What do you mean by that?

Kevin Brown: Let me give you a couple of examples, easy to understand ones. You look at backup tapes. They have been falling off the back of trucks, probably for a long time. It is only in the recent past that people had to start thinking about how much exposure there is. If you look at the new backup tapes that companies are using, you can hold almost a terabyte of data on a single tape. You are able to put all the data you want on that. You could put every credit card on the world on a single backup tape and put it in your back pocket. If you printed that much data out on paper, that’s twenty million pounds of paper. All the rules that have to do with, that have lasted for a million years, of what you do with paper or papyrus or stone tablets, all of those types of media which were well understood, the rules all change when you go digital. The issue that people have is they are starting to realize, “Wow, there is a lot of exposure.” Ninety-three percent of companies are sending these offsite with no protection at all. It is a matter of statistics. If you send around millions of tapes, some of them are going to fall of the back of trucks. Some of them are going to get lost. In this case, you can expose many, many millions of people. As a public policy issue and as a company’s responsibilities to its consumers this is a hot topic.

John Furrier: So this is where the encryption comes in I imagine.

Kevin Brown: Exactly whether it is a backup tape you want to have it encrypted in case it falls off the truck…or whether it is a big database holding millions of credit card transactions or bank account or x-rays…you can imagine the different kinds of data…source code, pharmaceutical designs.

John Furrier: It sounds so easy, just encrypt it. You are saying was it has been an issue of “slow”, “practices”?

Kevin Brown: If you look at today’s networks these are Gigabit Ethernet, 2 Gigabit fiber channel going to 4 Gig going to 10 Gig. These are very very fast networks. There are a lot of products than can do encryption. Encryption has been around for 4,000 years, but to do it fast in these kinds of environments without disrupting any of your enterprise applications or systems with all the interoperability and with a level of security that has been certified up to the military levels of security, that’s pretty unique. That is what people are looking at. If we are going to put security in we can’t have any of the compromises. We can’t have the tradeoffs of slowing down our networks, or making harder to recover data in a disaster. We can’t have it harder to manage. We are already up to our eyebrows in work. That is the set of data management challenges that NetApp excels at. The idea of simplifying data management now including not only the storage, but really the manipulation and the security of that data, that is the bigger vision that we want to make sure that people understand as we are rolling out new products, new initiatives, new partnerships.

John Furrier: What you are saying too is, “It is not just network-centric it is storage-centric.”

Kevin Brown: It is data-centric.

John Furrier: Exactly.

Kevin Brown: The other important thing about this is the customers are asking for us to have a very grown up and mature approach to this. They say, “Look we’ve got many different vendors in our data center…your competitors…different companies.”
We need solutions that work across all of these. One of the things we did, again to fit with this initiative, is we have carved a crew off as a separate subsidiary. That is fire walled off. So we can work with any storage company, even if they compete with NetApp storage products. We can collaborate with them to solve a customer problem, to work on engineering, interoperability, testing and all the things that make it easier for customers.

John Furrier: You have to get behind the curtain. You have to be exposed to some of the customers “jewels” in terms of systems, and that would include your competitors. That would make a lot of sense.

Kevin Brown: Yeah, think about IBM. They have had to deal with this. Everyone competes with IBM. Everyone works with IBM. They have learned how to deal with this. As you look at different companies like NetApp that are growing quickly, it is something where all of us realize that we need to be able to accommodate a more complicated model of working for customers’ benefit.

John Furrier: Well Decru is a great solution. We are here with KEVIN BROWN the VP of Marketing of Decru, a NetApp subsidiary company…fire walled off to work with customers in all types of areas. Final question for you, what types of solutions can NetApp customers and Decru customers see in the next year or two?

Kevin Brown: I think you’ll see us continue to innovate in terms of being able to cover the entire enterprise with a single platform. We’ve already rolled out NAS, DAS, SAN, and ISCUSI Tape. We’ve just rolled out SCUSI tape. We rolled out our new 10 port encryption appliance, software that automates all the key management and really bundling this together with NetApp storage and other solutions to really make it easier for customers. If you look at the analogy of the car, when they invented the Model T, it didn’t have any windows, locks alarms… today you just wouldn’t buy a car with out security. There’s one button on your key ring that turns it all on and off. It is very simple, even though that is different companies working together. It’s that same model for the customer. We’ve got to make it simple. One button, simple, all works together, it’s tested, you get it and it works. That is really where a lot of the focus is in terms of partnering, in terms of solutions, testing and innovations. We are really excited about the opportunity to work closely with customers to really solve some pretty challenging problems coming up over the next few years.

John Furrier: That is a great analogy. Make it comfortable. Make it work. Make things easier for customers.

Kevin Brown: Yes.

John Furrier: Well I do have one more question, which I realized that I wanted to ask. You mentioned that you were in D.C. What are some of the legal things? You were out with the founder of NetApp, talking to the legislators. What was the outcome of that? What were some of the discussions that you guys were having?

Kevin Brown: What is happening right now is there are a number of bills in Congress that are in committee and are being looked at and are working their way through. The way that D.C. works is they take the different bills and ideas, and they sort of combine during the process to come up with some sort of an aggregate… sometimes better, sometimes worse. The idea is some of the people who are writing this legislation today, either the Congress People or their legislative staff, we have been in contact with them. They asked if we could provide some perspective in terms of “how practical is this?” What is really the test? For example, if a tape falls of the back of the truck and it is encrypted with military grade encryption that is used on the battlefield today, is that good enough for credit cards? We think it is, but that is … a lot of these things that are a combination of public policy, business and technology. Where we have a unique role to play is we are working with government as a customer and in other ways. We are working with all the big enterprises and we make the technology. That is a place where we can try to contribute, to end up with a good win-win for consumers, for enterprises, for everyone.

John Furrier: The uncompromised security issue. How do customers get involved? Is there a forum? Is there website? How do people get involved with you guys?

Kevin Brown: What we would love to invite folks to do is to continue to track us. We have got a few customer newsletters and other ways that you can stay up on this. If your job involves data management and looking after the compliance and the safety of the data in the corporation, these are topics we think are pretty good to be smart about. We can certainly help out in terms of the technologies, how it is working, and some perspectives on how this rolls out. Again, what we believe is that there is no one point in time that you launch security and you’ve got it forever, right? It is an ongoing process. We would invite folks to stay in touch with us by our website or through podcasts like this, and to continue to educate themselves. We want to help out. From the perspective of technology, our commitment is we want to deliver a set of solutions that don’t compromise on either security…really give you the top end military grade of security when you need it… and don’t force you to compromise to trade off all of the things that have been painful in the past, whether it is performance or simplicity or inoperability etc. That is our brand promise, “How can we simplify data management? How can we let you get your business done with no compromise?”

John Furrier: Simplifying data management. We are here with Kevin Brown VP of Marketing with Decru a NetApp company announcing the Uncompromised Security Initiative – really pioneering a whole other level of our history, which is security-centric, data-centric…security and data. Thank you for the podcast.