I recently found myself standing at one end of a large field. People were everywhere and it was extremely loud. It was 37 degrees Fahrenheit and raining. I think I even saw a few snowflakes mixed in. I stood there soaked and shaking, but didn’t mind. I was cold and wet on the outside, but was glowing with pride on the inside.
Besides, I had experienced this before (dozens of times….) and knew what to expect.
Then I saw them – the lead group of runners of varsity girls cross country crested a rise toward the end of the first loop of their 5k race, which is the first time we had seen them in nearly five minutes. Between the starting gun and then, every teammate and family member hoped their friend or child was running strong and not injured as they’d just run through narrow wooded trails littered with tree roots, loose stones and mud.
My daughter, who was first off the starting line on this particular day, had fallen back to 4th place. I wasn’t worried though. Her strategy was to remain in the front group for the majority of the race and sprint the final 200 yards to the finish. She’s consistent and predictable, at least as much as any teen can be. At least that’s been my experience, and her, and her coach’s, expectation.
After all, it’s about making sure the experience meets the expectation.
In June 2016 I wrote a blog titled “That Familiar Enterprise Experience in the Cloud”, which discussed how Dell NetWorker protects cloud-resident workloads as an enterprise backup solution. The most important take-away in that article was that NetWorker protects applications and data in the public cloud with THE SAME USER EXPERIENCE as when using NetWorker to back up on-premises workloads.
At the time, NetWorker had recently announced protection for Amazon EC2 resident applications by backing them up to Amazon S3 storage. And most recently NetWorker announced the ability to protect Microsoft Azure resident applications to Azure Blob cloud object storage. For both AWS and Azure, the benefits of using NetWorker to protect cloud-resident application are the same: secure, highly-efficient short-term backups for operational recovery and long-term retention for compliance.
While this is my daughter’s first cross country season as a high school freshman, she has been in running sports such as soccer for 8 years. There are many similarities between soccer and cross country: focus on running and stamina, team and individual participation, etc. And she’s always performed the same way: strong and dependable throughout so everyone knows what to expect. She knows how to pace herself during long and short events. Her coaches know when and how to place her on the field or in which race. And the event attendees (fans, really – that’s me) know where to sit or stand to watch the most important parts of each game or meet. And that’s the most important thing – everyone knows what to expect so we all have the best experience.
It’s the same story for the backup administrator using NetWorker. Whether they’re using NetWorker on-premises in their local data center, or in the cloud, or both, their experience is the same and predictable. And for the nearly 40,000 NetWorker customers, that is their expectation.
