Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bradley Kolb, CEO of nScaled (Part 2)

Ilya Beyer: We’ve seen that when some of our existing customers acquire fully-automated disaster recovery solutions with nScaled, they not only protect all their mission-critical systems but were also able to save on cost. Those are the trends that we’re seeing there. Historically, disaster recovery was a luxury that was available only to large enterprise customers that had a lot of CapEx budget. nScaled, with their disruptive technology, was able to deliver that at a fraction of the cost to small to mid sized companies.

Sramana Mitra: There are a couple of trends that I am seeing. We talk to tons of people who are swimming in the cloud computing market and doing interesting things in various parts of the industry. Let me offer you a couple of broad trends and get your reactions to what you’re seeing along those lines. Number one is that there is a big trend towards hybrid cloud. There’s public and private cloud but there’s a lot of hybrid cloud trend going on, which complicates matters quite substantially when it comes to disaster recovery. How does that play in your world? Do you see that as a trend? Is that something that comes up in conversations?

Ilya Beyer: It’s hard for me to define it as a trend because this is how nScaled actually delivers disaster recovery solution. We are a hybrid cloud provider in essence. When we deploy our solution to customers, we not only offer a local recovery on their base site but also offer a remote recovery on the DR side.

Sramana Mitra: This might not be as big a trend in mid-market. It may be a bigger trend in the enterprise, so it may be why it might not be coming up in your world. Companies are using a bunch of public cloud solutions and they’re also using a bunch of private cloud solutions. In that scenario, doing disaster recovery on the private cloud solution is actually simpler. But going out to somebody else’s public cloud infrastructure and managing data and information sitting on other people’s public cloud infrastructure is a challenge. How does that work? That probably doesn’t work, right?

Mark Jameson: This is Mark Jameson. Sorry for joining late. It really is a mixed environment. We definitely do see hybrid production environments more and more. We work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and they have a hybrid environment there. It’s less likely for us to be doing disaster recovery outside of AWS. They’re usually going to do it within their own environment. Often, they then have to look at protecting the part of the production environment that is stored in their floor. That’s where we come in.

When you start moving away from what I call the big public world like AWS and more into regional, smaller public clouds – depending on what they allow their clients to do – we could actually service them because our agents are virtual. We could upload our agents into the cloud and into their traditional data center servers and protect both of them. It really depends upon the public cloud provider on whether they allow virtualization into their space or agents to be loaded in and what type of hypervisors they could be running.

Sramana Mitra: Does that apply to the application layer public cloud vendors like Salesforce.com?

Mark Jameson: No. We would not be protecting the SaaS providers. They’re going to have their own disaster recovery themselves.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bradley Kolb, CEO of nScaled
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