Tag: vmware

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Backup General

Perspectives on Quest Acquiring BakBone

About four months ago, I published a blog post discussing the future of dedicated VMware backup solutions.  The post ignited a bigger discussion and included additional blog entries from W. Curtis Preston, me, Jon Toigo, Virtual Tacit, Veeam and Quest software.  I strongly encourage readers to review the differing perspectives in each post.

I mention all of the above to provide context to Quest’s acquisition of BakBone.  For those who are unfamiliar, BakBone is a backup software provider that plays in the low end of the market.  They position their product, NetVault, as a full service backup application that includes traditional backup, CDP and deduplication.  They have had limited success in the US and Japan appears to be their strongest market.  Their technology was spun-off from AT&T labs.  (As an aside, CommVault was also a spin-off from AT&T Labs.  Those lab guys must have been doing some amazing backup stuff!)

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Categories
Backup

CDP data protection and VMware backup: A response

W. Curtis Preston recently posted a blog entry in response to my earlier post entitled Will dedicated VMware protection solutions go the way of CDP. Curtis clearly had strong opinions on the issue and his thorough write-up is appreciated.  I think that there is a disconnect here and wanted to clarify my thoughts.

I agree with Curtis’s detailed analysis of CDP technology, but my point was simply that three years ago CDP was hot.  Regardless of whether, there were 5 or 5,000 customers, the technology was the talk of the industry.  At the time, new CDP vendors were frequently appearing and existing companies were trying to position their solutions as “CDP-like”.  The hype machine was in full motion and it spanned the industry.

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Categories
Backup

Will dedicated VMware protection solutions go the way of CDP?

I previously posted a survey highlighting the different methods of protecting VMware environments.  The responses suggested that host-based backup is the predominant approach.  The least popular choice was “Dedicated VMware backup application (Veeam, Vizioncore, etc..)”.  These solutions exclusively protect virtual environments and they remind me of continuous data protection (CDP) technologies from the past.

Three years ago, CDP was hot.  It was a major industry buzzword and several companies were founded focusing exclusively on technologies that claimed to enable CDP functionality.  CDP enabled instantaneous backup, recovery and roll-back of critical data and some predicted that it would replace traditional data protection.  CDP upstarts made voluminous statements about the technology and the future, but they had miniscule installed bases particularly when compared to the traditional backup application vendors.  The challenge for the CDP providers was convincing end users to replace or augment existing backup infrastructures.  This was a challenge since end users had substantial investments in backup software, hardware and knowledge.  Although CDP provided customer value, it was only practical as a complementary solution to traditional backup and CDP functionality should have been embedded in existing backup applications.  As a result, most dedicated CDP companies were either bought or went away, and we now see backup ISVs including CDP functionality.

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Categories
Backup Restore

Agent-based VMware Backups

My last blog post contained a poll asking visitors about their primary VMware backup methodology.  The survey listed the common approaches to protecting virtualized environments including traditional agent-based,  VCB/VADP, dedicated VMware backup application, snapshots and doing nothing.  The results suggest that that the agent-based approach is most commonly used.  I anticipate that end users will migrate to backup methodologies that support VMware’s VADP functionality, but believe that there will always be a subset of people who rely on the agent-based approach. When implementing the agent-based approach, you should consider the following:

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Categories
Backup

Poll: VMware backup methodology

Server virtualization is a very powerful technology that can improve the economics of the datacenter.  However, it also creates new challenges for data protection.  VMware’s Vsphere API for Data Protection (VADP) improves the situation, but there still are multiple backup and recovery options.  Which do you use?

My primary backup methodology for virtualized servers is:

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Categories
Backup Restore

Pondering VPLEX and backup

The Twittersphere was abuzz yesterday with EMC’s announcement of VPLEX. For those of you who missed it, VPLEX is a storage virtualization and caching solution that presents block storage over long distances. The initial release only supports data center and metro distances with a future of continental and global reach. The announcement struck me as yet another flavor of storage virtualization which is already offered by many vendors, and got me thinking about protecting VPLEX data.

Traditional data protection architectures revolve around the concept of a master backup server supporting slave media servers and clients. The master server owns the entire backup environment and tells each server when and where to backup. The model is mature and works well in today’s datacenters where servers are static and technologies like VMotion move VM’s to new servers within the confines of the datacenter. However, the concept of global VMotion can break this model.

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