If your family was like mine, Thanksgiving was a two-tiered affair: The adults sat at the fancy dining room table while the kids had to sit in the kitchen, some even using a card table and folding chairs. You knew you were grown up when you moved up to the adult table. I guess this American coming-of-age ritual is pretty common with other rituals, too. There’s no formal ceremony, but everyone knows when little Johnny becomes just-plain John.
We see similar things happen in IT. New technologies and ideas are often given a pat on the head, a pinch on the cheek, but then sent to the kids table in the kitchen. Only mature technologies are taken seriously and granted equal status when enterprise architectures are defined!
One sure-fire way of determining when a technology is ready for prime time is when it is integrated with a major enterprise product. Sure, lots of products will support this or that, but thoroughly integrating a new technology requires serious effort. Not just any technology gets this kind of focus!
That’s why I’m pleased to see today’s announcement that CommVault has completely integrated API-driven public cloud storage with Simpana, their impressive data protection and archiving suite. It reminds me of that point when the backup products of yore finally adopted disk-based technology. Now there are three equal backup targets: Tape, disk, and cloud.
CommVault’s reputation in the storage industry is like BMW’s in cars: They’re an engineering-driven company and focus on offering the best technology. There’s no way CommVault would cut corners when it came to a fundamental technology. So they applied considerable engineering resources and delivered a really advanced product.
I’ve previously noted that cloud storage is not backup, but that the combination of cloud storage with a solid backup platform makes a killer data protection value proposition. This is exactly what CommVault is delivering. Plus, Simpana’s integrated encryption and data deduplication technology work to reduce cloud-related angst. And CommVault will be supporting just about every public cloud provider, beginning with Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Nirvanix (where I spend my days), and I hear Iron Mountain and EMC Atmos are on the way, too.
Read more over at Network World, DGIC, or check out my Nirvanix blog about CommVault’s cloud integration.
Note: Yeah, that’s a Tofurkey-brand vegetarian turkey in the photo above. Yum!