DPA for Service Providers - blog post

EMC's Chuck Hollis updated his blog today with a post on DPA for Service Providers.

Below is a small sample from that post regarding Service Provider Business Models Using Data Protection Advisor:

Why should SP's care?

Two reasons: save money and make money.

The "save money" case is rather predictable -- as an SP, you'll probably have to provide some flavor of data protection behind your own services, and you'll want to do so as reliably and cost-effectively as possible.  Basically, the same pitch we make to enterprise IT organizations.

The "make money" case is far more interesting.

Take backup-as-a-service, for example.  The service provider has a natural advantage -- they're based in a remote facility -- hence separated by distance.  That's appealing, and very costly for an IT organization to do themselves, especially if they're a smaller one.

The more sophisticated flavor is replication-as-a-service.  Rather than periodic backups and potentially lengthy restores, the customer is looking for lightweight DR so they can run in your data center if they end up having a really bad day.  Once again, VMware has made providing this sort of service far more attractive than the old days.

Finally, there's an interesting opportunity to provide solely the monitoring services for data protection activities being done by the enterprise IT group -- one that's growingly popular.