Storage Decision recently published an
article on application-specific backup tools that has caused me to do some thinking. The more I thought about the article and its framing, the more I realized it represents an old, outdated way of thinking. Here’s what I mean…
Let’s face it, SharePoint is a disruptive technology…and it’s not alone. Gazing into the technology horizon, it’s easy to discern that the world is moving ever-onward toward continually disruptive technologies. New terms like “Enterprise 2.0”, “Web 2.0” and “Cloud Computing” seem to enter the community lexicon almost daily. It’s a wonderful thing, and speaks to our continuing innovation. But it also speaks to a fundamental change in the way we must think about our technology solutions.
These emerging technologies have two things in common: First, the technologies themselves are empowering end-users to generate and share original content at an unprecedented scale. This is an unabashedly good thing. The second common feature of these technologies results from the first, but is not so wonderful: Across the board, these technologies require complex backend architectures, server arrays, and systems configurations to operate. This means that – though the end-user is empowered – administrators face a whole new world of complexity with regard to backend management. Consequently, the quaint terms, nice little boxes, and silo-styled thinking that the IT world has used to classify technologies are no longer accurate. A great example of this is common use of the terms “Point Solution” and “Suite”. The way today’s less inspired media uses these terms reveals how little they actually understand the changing reality of technology generally, and the evolution of platform solutions in particular.
In contrast to the Storage Decision article, I would argue that any “backup-only” solution – regardless of the number of disparate platforms it protects - is actually the new “point solution”. A solution that only delivers backup, even if it does so across a handful of platforms, cannot be classified as a suite. Rather, it is a point solution for backup, and that’s all.
This is primarily because the multiple platforms these “backup-only suite solutions” claim to protect have become so unique and complex, the multi-platform solution is incapable of delivering adequate functionality for any particular one of them. The smart “backup-only” vendors have realized this, and have started adding archiving and other functions to their backup-point solutions. But without true expertise in the particular platform and its complexities, it’s rarely – if ever - a best-of-breed solution.
The new “suite” approach is to take a complex platform, truly understand its usage and its infrastructure requirements, and build a product to fully address its needs in all their nuance and complexity. This approach leads to the creation of a full menu of best-of-breed, platform-specific products. This is the “suite” of the 21st century. Suite 2.0.
Marginally addressing a single concern (e.g. backup) across a handful of platforms is the new “point” solution. Point 2.0.
Comprehensively handling the infrastructure management requirements of a platform in all of its complexity – that’s a new suite.
The smart companies have realized this. To see this you only have to look as far as IBM and their very recent restructuring of the Tivoli sales organization. IBM, like most companies stuck in the old way of thinking, used to have storage experts that targeted the storage administrators responsible for doing backup, and tried to sell backup-only solutions to them. But IBM realized that with the dawn of platforms like SharePoint, the decision-making landscape was changing. When IBM’s salespeople talked to prospects about
SharePoint, the storage admin was no longer involved in the backup management decision. It was now the Windows application people and the SharePoint team running the show. And it was these same folks who were also making decisions about platform architecture, archiving, configuration, security management, system look and feel, etc. So IBM restructured their sales team to reflect the new reality. No longer would IBM’s backup experts target storage admins – but rather they would have platform management experts target the application admins. Today, IBM leverages enterprise sales reps that know the platform, and they sell “suites” of solutions that meet multiple needs across a single platform. No longer are they trying to sell a single backup platform for multiple systems, but instead have appreciated the unique, integrated needs of the platform as a whole, and approach the platform admins saying, “Oh, you’re using that system. Well, look at all the things we can do for it.”
This is a telling story when considering SharePoint backups. To simply say that SharePoint data protection involves only database backups fundamentally misunderstands the concerns of today’s SharePoint administrator. Saying database backups are sufficient to adequately protect the platform shows a clear lack of understanding of SharePoint, how it is used, and how it is deployed. A single SharePoint content database can have hundreds of sites, each with very different use and very different requirements and service level agreements. Some can be highly business-critical and some less so. If the business-criticality of Site A demands hourly backups, and Site B demands weekly backups, is it realistically adequate to leverage a solution that can’t discern between sites? No one is going to backup the entire database every hour! Several of the so-called “suite” solutions referenced in the Storage Decision article advertise that they can do item-level restores from a database backup, but how many of them can do item-level backup? The answer is they can’t, so how protected is the platform?
And what about all the customizations, webparts, and features that are integral components of those sites, but that aren’t part of the database and sit on the web or app servers? It only takes one disaster for companies to realize how critical these componansts are. How many of these so-called “suite Solutions” can backup anything outside the content database? The answer? None.
"Suite" isn’t exactly the right term for these solutions, is it?
And that’s just the backup side. Today’s "Suite 2.0" delivers all of the infrastructure management solutions an SP admin needs to protect, optimize, and manage his or her deployment. That’s a Suite 2.0 solution, not a point solution.
AvePoint’s DocAve is comprised of 20 different modules, each independently deployable yet fully integrated into a unified platform. Together, they handle everything from backup and restore, high availability, centralized configuration and security management, content management and restructuring, data synchronization and replication, archiving, auditing, eDiscovery, monitoring, reporting and analytics, and migration from legacy data sources. This is no point solution. I’d argue that DocAve is the true suite here, and that people who are used to the old terminologies—where one specific function (like backup), marginally performed across multiple platforms was considered a suite—are going to have to comprehend the type of suites today's administrators demand. Suite 2.0. It’s a new world, with a new perspective. The old ways of thinking and discussing platform solutions no longer hold. It’s about time the media started realizing it.