Virtualization makes the differenceWith the rise of virtualization we have seen a drastic shift in the backup and disaster recovery choices our customers can employ. In the traditional physical server world the vast majority of our customers were leveraging Symantec Backup Exec, writing backups to tape. There are a number of challenges to this approach that we have seen customers struggle with through the years:Tape being slow and unreliableBackup Exec stability problemsLong backup timesLarge Backup setsDifficulties in restoring to dissimilar hardwareRecovery time objectives not able to be metWith the jump to server virtualization new backup options have opened up for customers. We have seen most customers jump to whole machine, hypervisor aware backup technology. The biggest choices we see in this area are PHD Virtual, and Veeam. Some of the advantages of these technologies include:Backup to disk (NAS/SAN/Local Disk)Shorter backup timesDeduplication and reduction in data being backed upIncrease in recovery pointsAbility to recover or failover to recovery data centers in minutes or hours, instead of days.The benefits above have been critical for our customers in being able to meet their Disaster recovery needs in a way they never could before. We have many customers who have designed their computing environment so that they have internal failover to separate hardware, in addition to external replication to a third data center for disaster recovery. Using hypervisor aware backup methodologies allows them economically achieve business goals that in the past were available only to larger enterprises.AuthorScott Hahn
