Vendor Landscape: Virtual Backup Software
Evaluate virtual backup software to end the arguing between virtual and backup admins.
- With advances in server capacity (memory capacity, multi-core processing) and increases in vCPU, RAM, IOPS capacity limitations, the majority of servers can now be virtualized. In 2012, more than half of server workloads (58%) are virtualized.
- Point solutions designed for virtual backup introduced agentless backups that reduced impact of backup and recovery on production workloads. As more and more production apps get virtualized, virtual admins that had purchased point solutions and backup admins using traditional backup products are overlapping in responsibility.
- Traditional backup solutions have found ways to conduct agentless backups – with VMware largely through exposure of APIs – and virtual backup solutions have begun to add support for physical servers and application awareness for app-consistent backups. This is pushing buyers to focus on specific requirements, in terms of backup media support (e.g. tape) and characteristics that ease implementation and management of virtual infrastructure.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Organizations are becoming more and more invested in virtualization. This makes it important to select a solution that best meets recovery needs for VMs. As organizations provision an increasing number of VMs, it is getting more challenging to effectively backup everything.
- Point solutions for VM backup are inexpensive relative to traditional solutions that handle physical and virtual backup and are simpler to use. However, most organizations are not 100% virtualized meaning that companies often manage two solutions: one for virtual and one for physical.
- Many point solutions in the backup market do not provide the capability to directly backup to tape for long-term retention. If you currently use tape, or plan to, this will require management of two solutions, which should be a consideration in the evaluation process.
Impact and Result
- Understand what kind of virtual backup solution is appropriate for core needs, and which features help to meet recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives.
- Create a shortlist of consolidated storage vendors, and select which is the best fit for your organization and budget.
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