Contributed Article by Robbie Wright, Commvault

With VMworld right around the corner, everyone is itching to get to San Francisco and kick off one of the best industry shows of the year. As our teams prepare for the event, we've been chatting about some of the major topics we think the show will address and wanted to start some discussion about these themes: 

Ready for Any...thing besides added costs and reduced control

Going off of the conferences "Ready for Any" theme for this year, we're predicting that the next phase of discussions around virtualizing workloads will be more apparent, specifically around costs. Fortunately, organizations no longer have to be convinced to migrate data to the cloud. Unfortunately, more surprises are popping up as businesses are increasing the need for VM provisioning agility. These surprises come in the form of rogue public clouds and data created beyond IT's control, leading to security, compliance and control issues. IT teams certainly aren't ready for these issues, so we're hoping this topic will be addressed throughout the show this year.

Backup v. Recovery

The age-old debate - which came first: Backup or recovery? Truly, the two go hand-in-hand, but backup TO the cloud can be very different than backup IN the cloud. Further, we've been finding that the value is actually in recovery in the cloud, and not backup. We think VMworld attendees will be buzzing about this topic, given the fact that disaster recovery and workload portability is something our customers are asking us about all the time.

Converged Infrastructures

Similar to the evolution of cloud lifecycles, virtual infrastructures and the relationship they have with supporting hardware is changing. Virtual infrastructures are becoming more advanced, especially when you consider vVols and vSAN, which have added new variables to the equation. Hyperconverged infrastructures add more flexibility, but can also add more complexity. All aspects have an effect on the success of VM backup and recovery solutions, and we think many attendees will be chatting about architecting these solutions for improved environments.

What else are you expecting to be a hot topic at VMworld? What does "Ready for Any" mean for you and your organization?

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About the Author 

Robbie Wright is Senior Product Marketing Manager for Commvault. In this role, Robbie focuses on Server Virtualization and Cloud solutions and is a veteran in the storage, virtualization, and cloud market for more than 10 years. With former roles at both Dell and Rackspace, he has extensive experience with VMware, Hyper-V, and OpenStack, and is a frequent contributor to many types of social media. Robbie holds an MBA from The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.