Today has a huge set of new releases from EMC’s Data Protection and Availability Division – the teams that focus on the continuum of data protection and availability. This is one important update, tune in here for the full set, and I’ve got a couple other blogs I’m working on.
------
It’s so cool to see an idea get turned into something real.
A couple years ago (wow, was VMworld 2011!) VMware introduced vCloud Director (and the concepts of virtual datacenter abstractions), and we demoed what was frankly (at that time) just an idea – the concept of how data protection would need to evolve around an IaaS, multi-tenant world – and “protection” would shift to “protection policy” (for the “way back machine” – click here). It got a LOT of interest.
Fast forward to 2014.
VMware’s vCloud Hybrid service is now up and running with many clients, along with other VMware-powered public clouds. And the idea of “Cloud Protection” has moved from idea to reality. With vCHS – the design target is the agility, elasticity and economic transparency of other cloud offerings – but for all workloads, including enterprise workloads (BTW – vCHS won best cloud offering at Interop this week, and VSAN in both the storage and overall category – a great week for VMware too!)
Most enterprise applications that aren’t re-written around low expectations of infrastructure resilience (and therefore have application-level resilience built in) have expectations of protection, recovery at the infrastructure layer – and vCHS must support this sort of Enterprise backup-as-a-service for compute instances – above and beyond storage state snapshot that is used as the general protection method in other cloud offerings.
This is what it looks like:
To make this work, we realized we would need to be able to scale backup appliances (in hardware appliance variation like DD and in software+COTS hardware variations like Avamar Virtual Edition). Avamar grids at largest scale were not designed for service providers – so we needed to crack a better scaling mode. We would need to implement full multi-tenancy models (including logical repositories, and tenant-level policy control) – as well as making Data Domain appliances also be able to support a secure multi-tenancy model (also part of today’s news). We would need to make everything automatable via APIs.
This was designed for scale, and designed for service providers. It’s how we do it in partnerhsip with vCHS, and any service provider that is interested – we want to hear from you!
It’s not perfect (always more to do), but powerful today.
Here’s a demonstration of how it works behind the scenes (vCO workflows - and UI if you want it – for onboarding a new tenant):
… And here’s a demonstration of how it works from the tenant standpoint – managing their policies, and administrative and end-user control of backup on demand and recovery (all driven through vCAC).
Where are we taking this next? I suspect there’s a lot of demand for this beyond the service provider – and into the Private Cloud within the enterprise, and you can expect us to broaden these concepts into the protection portfolio.
There’s a "meta-point” that’s interesting to me about this: the process of idea to real can be a winding, but fulfilling road. There’s another meta-point (likely obvious to many) – solutioneering for service providers is fundamentally different than enterprise customers (even if they are targeting enterprise workloads). Another example of this is that VMAX Cloud Edition’s primary learning/value was in the abstraction/automation – not in VMAX (which was never intrinsically designed for a multi-tenant service provider. This learning is now in the ViPR Controller – and applicable to a broad set of persistence architectures – from Object stacks to scale-out NAS and to software-only transactional stacks.
I’m witnessing (from the outside) a great positive feedback loop from vCHS on VMware’s own internal products (and the EMC products that supports vCHS) in terms of the vCHS team being a “forcing function” to do things that are great, in a new way, and the same thing is true of EMC’s product innovation.
As always – feedback welcome!
Does this accomplish off site backups of vCHS vm's?
Posted by: sean | April 03, 2014 at 12:37 PM