Aman Singh | VMworld 2013
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2013-08-27

Wikibon's Dave Vellante and David Floyer sat down with Aman Singh, the senior enterprise storage and backup architect for Jive Software on SiliconANGLE's theCUBE to discuss backup as a service and its future as the industry moves toward broader virtualization.

Singh started off by stating Jive Software sees a future that will eventually make e-mail a relic, going so far as to say that in just a few years, the younger generation will think of e-mail as current generations view the old vinyl record. This will be achieved, he claims, as the transition from e-mail collaboration to cloud collaboration is more widely offered and embraced. Ultimately, this will greatly enhance the general protection of data for a customer organization.

Jive is one of the pioneers in the BaaS market, and Singh was the principal architect for the product offered by Jive to their customers. He believes that by providing both the software and architecture for their customers BaaS needs it allows for both data redundancy and reslilency.

The first iteration of Jive's architecture model didn't allow for much freedom in deciding how long your data could be stored. With three months being an industry standard, Jive was unable to accommodate a request if a customer wanted data stored longer. This was because a consistent policy was required across the entire infrastructure.

Singh stated this required Jive to develop a more sophisticated architecture. "We re-architectured to address individual customers needs." This re-architecturing also addressed individual customers monthly budgeting concerns.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in Jive's offering of dedupe technology. As he mentioned, "The dedupes we now offer are much higher than a traditional production system. We can run a current dedupe system over the next five years with no additional cash outlay required. It's been a huge financial benefit for Jive."

In previous architectures, in order to deliver requested data a whole block of files would need to be extracted and then searched through in order to find your selected file. In the new architecture offered by Jive, that process is streamlined significantly, allowing for the exact data or file to be selected and retrieved.

Jive, as a company, is 99 percent virtualized. This allows a customer to dictate specific proxy policies for how they want their architecture to perform. Once that task is done, the basic operation of the architecture becomes very simple.

Vellante, Floyer and Singh wrapped up their conversation talking about how, in a recent Wikibon survey, respondents claimed they were willing to trade lock-in to a provider for improved simplicity of use. And Singh believes this to be true in his experience as well. As he stated, working with multiple vendors makes fixing the inevitable issues that arise far more difficult. If you have a product bundled from a single vendor it becomes much more easy to deal with. This is because you get the resources you need to address an issue on a single call.

Singh finished the discussion by pointing out each organization should have a working grasp on how their environment is currently operated and where, eventually, they would like their environment to go. This will enable them to sign with vendors that will work best to take them from their current storage architecture to a more business-friendly BaaS.

Aman Singh, Jive Software, at VMworld 2013 with John Furrier and Dave Vellante

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