Data Protection Man v Big Data Billionaires: Passion Ignites Storage

More agile than Cloud Computing! More efficient than Virtualization! Able to store, protect, analyze and recover in a single transaction!

Look, up in the Cloud! It's a Purpose Built Backup Appliance (PBBA)! It's a Docker Container! It's Data Protection man!

Yes, it's Data Protection man, strange dweller from the data center, who came to the digital age with mastery and capabilities far beyond those of mortal men. Data Protection man, who can change the course of Backup and Recovery, intelligently store data in the blink of an eye, and who, disguised as zeros and ones, fights an eternal battle for simplicity, agility and cost efficiency.

Forced to step out of his comfort zone in the late 80’s and early 90’s by multiple projects and small groups of engineers in Research Centers writing thousands of lines of code. CPIO becomes Data Protection Man, trained by Murphy’s Law and armed with software-defined X (SDx) which can eliminate manual processes associated with legacy hardware configurations. The shape shifting hero must use his new skills to tame the Information Explosion, also known as Data Deluge, from its continued trend of “information created” exceeding the available storage space.

Can Data Protection Man take on the billionaires and their larger-than-life passions? Journey with me through a series of quests as we explore what lies ahead for the Data Protection / Backup Recovery market.

The Quest for Intelligent Alien Life

On July 20, 2015 Russian billionaire, Yuri Milner decided to provide $100 million for a project that will scan the skies for signs of intelligent alien life. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Milner’s check will go to support a team of researchers, based at the University of California, Berkeley, tasked with collecting more data from outer space in a single day than previous efforts collected over an entire year.” This will be a very data-intensive project and I can only imagine the team of Data Protection specialists that will be required to backup, manage, and protect all of the data from “two of the world’s largest telescopes, in West Virginia and New South Wales, Australia, over the next 10 years.”

Where do you think the scan data will be stored? How much data will be added to the digital explosion? I am sure these billions of frequencies from space will reach thousands of petabytes or even a couple of exabyte’s. It sounds like “big data” to me.

This one should be a no-brainer for Data Protection Man!

The Mind of a Medical Genius

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is considered to be the world’s richest doctor and has been working on several big ideas. Dr. Soon-Shiong founded two drug companies, Abraxis and American Pharmaceutical Partners and invented a cancer drug, Abraxane. And, he owns a 4% stake in the Los Angeles Lakers. He created Nantworks, a company that intends to use big data to deliver personalized medicine. Under Nantworks is an entire ecosystem of other companies such as NantHealth, NantOmics, NantBioScience, NantCell, NantPharma, NantMobile, NantStudio, NantCapital and NantCloud.

Dr. Soon-Shiong has created an intelligent patient engine that will interrogate a patient's molecular profile and find a unique antigens on the surface of tumor cells. Then, with that data you will have the ability to identify an antibody that might match that antigen and target a tumor. According to Patricia F. Dimond, Ph.D. “It’s going to take massive amounts of computer power for storage capacity, data management, and analysis. The amount of data generated could reach the petabyte range.”

Data Protection Man is definitely up for the challenge of healthcare!

And the winner is….?

Billionaires will not run out of ideas as according to the Telegraph, “in the UK alone, there were 581,000 new companies founded last year; more than one a minute.” The rich will continue to follow their passions, so big data will continue to get bigger. Whether you like it or not, big data is here to stay, so embrace it, analyze it and keep an open mind when you are at the whiteboard strategizing your next Data Protection technology infrastructure refresh.

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Also, if you would like to ‘Follow’ me, please feel free to connect via Twitter and for more creative content on Backup & Recovery please listen to my podcast Data Protection Gumbo.

Here are some other recent posts I have written on LinkedIn:

• Software Defined… - The Cloud’s Apprentice
• If Leonardo da Vinci created a Backup Appliance…
• Move Over VM’s – The Rise of Containers

Demetrius Malbrough is an expert in solving Data Protection challenges for small, medium and enterprise companies. He holds multiple Backup and Recovery certifications with major software leaders represented in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Backup / Recovery Software. Demetrius is passionate about providing solutions to help companies meet demanding data protection objectives in the face of data’s changing paradigm in the Copy Data Management market.