As a part of a rendezvous series with multiple vExperts, we were able to catch up with Brandon Lee, Senior Writer and owner at Virtualizationhowto.com. Brandon is a prolific blogger who has 15+ years of experience in various IT industries spanning education, manufacturing, hospitality and consulting for various technology companies including Fortune 500 companies.
1) Tell us about your journey into the virtualisation world?
Brandon Lee: Back in the early 2000’s, this technology called “virtualization” was introduced to me in an enterprise environment that I was working in at the time. We set out to test a couple of products that were coming on the scene at that time, VMware being one of those. Little did I know that introduction and work with the product early on would change my life. After seeing what virtualization products could do for the enterprise, I knew at that point the server world and enterprise IT would never be the same. Since then, my focus and primary target expertise has centered around virtualization in the enterprise environment.
2) What will be the biggest trends in the field of Virtualization in the upcoming years?
Brandon Lee: There is no doubt about it, the field of virtualization is changing and morphing into exciting new technologies. I think we will certainly see a push for more containerized workloads as containers are gainly a lot of traction in the industry but as of yet simply have not had a mature delivery platform to allow them to be reliably consumed in the enterprise. As we continue to see containers mature, we will most definitely see this trend in the enterprise. This will also require that enterprises rethink how they deploy applications and think about resources.
Serverless architecture will also continue to become a player as well. There are many PaaS and FaaS ideas and offerings, driven by the cloud that will also make organizations rethink infrastructure. Platforms and functions of software can be offloaded to these new ways of architecture and thinking.
Cloud will only continue to gain momentum. We are seeing this huge shift in the enterprise where greenfield installations of many services and other infrastructure are being offloaded to the cloud. Also, many are looking at moving infrastructure to the cloud when hardware refreshes come due. Cloud allows organizations to move much more swiftly with projects as they don’t have to build out all of this infrastructure that can easily be provisioned in the cloud..
However, each organization has to weigh out the cost benefit for each case. The change from a capital expense to operating expense is attractive for many.
3) Why do you think that backups are important for any industry?
Brandon Lee: Backups will continue to be relevant, necessary, and critical for today’s enterprise environments. Today’s organizations are more web driven and “always on” than ever before. So they have to think about DR and recovery from numerous types of data loss. The recent example of WannaCry also emphasizes the need to protect against potential malware concerns, especially ransomware. If an organization is not thinking about DR, they won’t be in business very long.
4) After having reviewed our product, what makes you think that our product stands out from competitors?
Brandon Lee: Vembu BDR Suite is one of the most capable and feature-rich backup solutions I have seen. Often you see backup solutions that are good in one area or cover certain technologies. With BDR Suite however, you can cover most areas of any enterprise environment today including virtual environments (various vendors), physical environments, and cloud environments. Having this single pane of glass and “swiss army knife” type product makes life as an administrator thinking about DR much easier. Vembu BDR Suite is capable, feature rich, and all encompassing.
5) Describe our product in 1 sentence?
Brandon Lee: Vembu BDR Suite is an agile, efficient, capable, and feature rich backup solution covering all of today’s enterprise IT backup needs.
6) What are the improvements/suggestions needed for our product?
Brandon Lee: Vembu BDR Suite will continue to improve by staying current with releases from VMware as well as Hyper-V environments and other hypervisors. Adding support for Hyper-V clusters would be a great addition. Also, continued cloud integration and flexibility to run components anywhere will only strengthen the product. Also, continued improvement on the installation of the product as well as the UI will be great as well!
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