ROBO stands for Remote Office / Branch Office. It's one of those secret-handshake industry terms we all fall into the trap of using without really understanding what we're talking about.
Why is this interesting?
First, people realize that the information outside the data center can be the most expensive / risky / unproductive information in the environment.
And second, lots of vendors are piling in with solutions in this space, and it is becoming very noisy and confusing.
So, I thought it'd be worth a post or two to step back and offer a few thoughts on the topic.
The Rationale
Lots of businesses have remote offices. But these remote offices come in many different sizes and shapes, so it's very hard to generalize on the category.
But, I don't think it's hard to agree on the following:
- Any information used and stored outside the data center is inherently more expensive to own. It costs more to provision infrastructure and manage it (generally speaking).
- Any information used and stored outside the data center is inherently more risky. It's harder to back it up effectively, and secure it against unauthorized use.
- Any information used and stored outside the data center is inherently harder to leverage into new value. Pretty hard to incorporate external information sources into new workflows, repositories, views, etc. when it's sitting at the end of a very long wire.
So there you have it -- the basic informationist trifecta: save money, avoid risk, make money.
So it's a growing topic in information management -- simply because, sooner or later, IT will be responsible for ALL the corporate information, and not just the stuff that conveniently happens to live in the data center.
When I talk about this topic, and try to position all the different technologies and approaches out there, I've gotten into the habit of laying out the problem in terms of incremental complexity.
So let's start with the simplest example.
A Very Small Branch Office
Imagine a retail branch of a regional bank. Or maybe a local sales office that supports 10-12 people. Or something similar.
Maybe there's a file server in the location. Most of the apps they use are either personal productivity (think Microsoft Office) or corporate applications over the network.
There's not much data there at the branch office, and what there is, really isn't that active. No IT people in sight, and no one who wants to be one.
I look at this as a classic use case for WAAS technlogy (Cisco comes to mind for me).
These people are fine using virtual filesystems instead of the real thing. And since most of their applications are remote, they'll benefit from protocol acceleration and spoofing.
IT gets to centralize information, take the servers and such out of the branch office. Everyone wins. And, from what I can tell, this is a pretty popular approach -- for this particular use case.
Now Let's Add Some More Stuff
So, let's say we're maybe talking a small retail outfit as part of a chain. Or maybe our sales location is a bit bigger, with more people and more stuff.
There are now local applications that aren't just pipes to a remote data center. There's much more information, and perhaps some of it is pretty "hot" in that it's busy data.
Putting everything through a remote WAAS pipe isn't so comfortable for folks in this situation. There's more concern about performance, and the ugly spectre of a network outage taking the whole party down. Of course, that never happens.
Now you'll need some IT capability in the location, but you want to centralize the difficult bits.
I'd still consider WAAS for part of the environment, but you'll probably want to add remote backup to the mix. Remote sites are notorious for either not doing backups, or doing them poorly.
Lots of different approaches to moving transactional data -- we've got several in our portfolio, including OnCourse (btw, one of those unsung heroes in the EMC price book that does amazing data transfer tricks in the world). And of course, there's application level or database replication.
But you still need to grab the entire environment, and that's where Avamar is finding a strong play.
If you've followed the story so far, you'll remember that Avamar does client-side data deduplication. And if you're sending buckets of information through a real skinny pipe, that's not a bad thing to have.
The fact that it stores its backup images as mountable file systems means that recovery is pretty flexible as well. Also, you're free to parse through the backup image looking for compliant information, or stuff that needs to be in some sort of repository, and so on.
But sometimes, you need external storage at these sites. And you want something that is iSCSI-based, and dead easy to provision, upgrade, etc. By decideldly non-IT people.
And when you look at the AX-150, the NS20 and the lower end of the CX line, that's what you'll find.
And It Even Gets Bigger -- Sometimes
Going up the food chain a bit more, sometimes we find self-standing IT at a remote location. Maybe it's a manufacturing facility. Or an R+D center. Or something that has more than just a few servers and few local applications.
In these environments, there's even an IT person or two to keep things running smoothly.
Now the picture has changed considerably. You've got to give the local IT guy the ability to react to local problems, but not burden them with mundane administrivia tasks.
I think that WAAS can still play a role for remote application acceleration, as well as access to corporate file shares if needed.
Remote backup still is attractive. I haven't met anyone yet who likes doing this stuff.
But the management model has to change a bit. Alarms and alerts need to go to two places, not one. Configuration changes might be allowed locally, but monitored centrally. Central IT needs the ability to step in and help if help is needed.
As an example, ControlCenter supports a federated model. You can define roles and responsibilities that can be performed locally, but there's still a central authority. Smarts supports this as well in terms of real-time event correlation. And so on.
It's a more sophisticated model, but the requirements are more sophisticated as well.
There's much more to the discussion, of course.
Strangely enough, many of these ROBO discussions end up being around roles and responsibilities, who's in charge of what. They get stuck on the shared control model.
I can see the local IT person's need to be responsive to "their" users, but at the same time I can see central IT's need to have accountability for the big picture. So the debate rages on ...
And there are those that are taking a big bite at the apple, and seriously taking this all the way to the deskop with thin clients.
But I keep coming back to the central themes of the informationist discussion:
- information is becoming the single most important asset for companies today
- IT is finding itself getting pulled into a new role as the "CFO of information".
And, viewed through that lens, remote office information is definitely part of the landscape, and won't be going away anytime soon.
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