NetApp has alliances with many data protection suppliers such as Cohesity-Veritas, Commvault, Rubrik, and Veeam. Yet it also has its own BlueXP Backup and Recovery offering. Is it competing with these businesses? How do the in-house NetApp and external partner data protection offerings relate to each other?
We talked to Gagan Gulati, NetApp’s SVP and General Manager for Data Services, to find out the basic data protection situation.
Blocks & Files: I wonder how NetApp positions BlueXP Backup and Recovery alongside data protection products from its partners.
Gagan Gulati: With Cohesity we’ve worked in the past, even today with Veritas, we are actually integrating actively with Veeam right now with a couple of things, they want us to work on backup and Kubernetes. There is just so much we do with our partners and our customers want us to do that.
Generally speaking, there are a set of use cases that these partners do very well and there are use cases that they don’t do very well. I’ll give you a few examples. If I’m a customer and I want to take a backup and put it on S3 Glacier or on a tape every it can take eight hours, 16 hours, or more. I want to do this heterogeneously for all my storage, for my Office 365 use case, for my Salesforce use case. We want to help our partner do the best job, but we have a lot of use cases like accidental deletion of data or the dev test environment … where the RPO and RTO needs are something that a partner can’t meet. So I have a highly critical application. I have a highly critical workload and I want RPOs and RTOs that are in minutes, not hours or days.
At NetApp, we have built products over the last decade that help you do that. For example, SnapCenter or SNAP Manager, which is one of the crown jewels of the company, which helps our database owners, application owners take snapshots, take backups, within minutes and then recover within minutes while the partner’s products, because they’re designed for a heterogeneous environment, could take hours and sometimes days.
The Blue XP backup and recovery product as it stands today came into being from something very similar, which is customers demanding two or three things. One, an RPO and RTO that they can’t get from our partners, essentially from their main players. So it’s not that we are trying to go and replace a Commvault, for example, at a customer account. We can’t; they’re a heterogeneous player. We want to work with them.
But our customers are also pretty clear, whether they’re an EDA customer or M&E customer who use our backup and recovery service today, that for particular use case or these use cases that I’m running, when I’m making a 3, 2, 1 or a 3, 2 1, 1 backup, and I want to recover in a number of minutes, not hours, we want to use software that is designed for NetApp.
We want to use backup and recovery software designed for NetApp that gives them the best RPO and RTO. So that’s number one. That’s a huge use case.
Blocks & Files: And the second thing?
Gagan Gulati: Number two, what happens today is that, generally speaking, when you deploy any partner product, you need media servers, you need scanners to go in and scan. It’s an outside-in process. You’re cataloguing that way.
What happens when you use NetApp backup and recovery product? The TCO gets really low because of our storage efficiency, because of the way we incrementally backup. If you have volume, like 10, 20 petabytes of data for a workload that you want to back up for example, and then you want to recover quickly, you have to use something designed for that on NetApp storage. That’s where our [BlueXP] products shine.
By no means do we want to go and say … we are a heterogeneous backup player. We will never be. But we do focus on getting our customers the best of the ability for the specific use cases that we want to work on. So that’s the current state; that’s basically where NetApp [BlueXP] backup is [placed].
Blocks & Files: You are outlining a way in which customers can get the best of both worlds, I think.
Gagan Gulati: Correct. I think the only point I’ll make is that what we have seen it is that, within customers, we cater to personas, different personas. Commvault and Rubrik etc. go to market motions typically; their push is to the chief compliance officer and also to the head of IT, the CIO.
In our case, we start with the application owners and the database owners. Then, of course, it goes up to the storage admin and the VP of IT and the CIO because of the needs and the requirements that we fulfilled just being different. Or us being able to fulfill a requirement because, hey, ‘we can store your data in an extremely efficient way with the highest RPO and RTO. And we don’t require any local infrastructure’.
What happens if you are an Oracle owner or you are an SAP owner, you’re a SQL owner or you are running a company’s payment app and you have SLAs to maintain for RPO and RTO and you want it to be done in application-consistent ways? Then, unfortunately, a partner may not be able to help as much as you may think because their data movers are generally slow.
They copy file by file where we are making incremental SNAP snapshots and we lock them. So there are just certain set of advantages that we have in those use cases.
[With] incremental, you can make incremental snaps every minute if you want to, every second if you want to and not have to worry about eight hours later, ‘oh my God, I lost my data for eight hours. What should I do now?’ So from an application owner and a database owner point of view, or even from a typical EDA workload, those are the capabilities that when customers need them, they know they have to come to us. Those personas come work with us directly.
Comment
Gulati is claiming that when a backup/data protection scenario involves fast RPO/RTO numbers and applies within a homogeneous NetApp environment then BlueXP Backup and Recovery is the way to go. But when, on the other hand, the data protection scenario involves heterogeneous systems, and the RPO/RTO requirements are more relaxed, then a data protection third party such as Cohesity-Veritas, Commvault, Rubrik, or Veeam is a better choice.
