2013 is, according to many, the year of software-defined storage.  Let’s discuss what is new and different about it this year.

Like many of you, I regularly read the tech press. And one thing that always interests me is outages. Being a Fellow here at Acronis, I am especially interested in outages that could have either easily been avoided or remediated rapidly. Most people in the tech industry were aware of the recent Amazon outage. But I was much more interested in the 18-minute Google Mail outage that happened two weeks before Christmas. To make a long story short, Google rolled out a routine load balancer update. There are fail safes and monitors, but stuff happens and the sequence was: 0845PT apply the patch, 0906 see the problem, 0913 revert the update, 0916 all back to normal.

When I think about backing up data, I don’t think about the features of a particular product. Instead, I think about the problem I am trying to solve and the right solution to do the job. When thinking about backups and eliminating a single point of failure, or creating a ‘Plan B’ disaster recovery location, the cloud comes to mind as the solution.

Thanks to all the beautiful minds, a revolution in IT happens about once in every decade, leading to a major shift in nearly every area, including backup and recovery. Old and once mighty kings go away and dinosaurs die as they can no longer adapt to new conditions. We’re lucky to live in a time when so many breakthrough changes are happening at once: from explosive growth of Internet bandwidth and storage capacities, to global adoption of mobile devices, virtualization and cloud. In 2013 we will finally start to see huge effects of this mix.