A lot of things have changed in the technology marketplace. One constant however has been the strategic value of locking customers into an ecosystem because they come to a point where they can't afford to switch. This may finally be changing with cloud computing, open source, and virtualization on the rise. Basically, people are starting to use so many different tools from so many different sources as they venture out on to the web that they are growing comfortable with not having a complete ecosystem from a single vendor.
As the reader may know, offsite and online data replication (DR) is a big focus here at WarLock Software and we believe our DR+ solution is an excellent tool to gain ecosystem independence in three ways:
- WarLock Software's DR+ solution runs on anything and backs up everything. This strikes a blow to the ecosystem argument that data must be moved into a proprietary storage device.
- Real opportunities for improving operations flow from flexible replication that can read from and write to many disparate sources including in our case, Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) with persistent storage.
- A lot of work is being done with a combination of tools on the desktop, the web, and the intranet and replicating these pockets of information is beyond a typical storage ecosystem.
Finally, VMWare and Hyper-V are bursting single vendor ecosystems apart at the seams because they are so cost effective and flexible, especially for business continuity and disaster recovery. We're hoping all of these factors together may finally make it "affordable" to move away from vendor ecosystem lock in.
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