At VMworld this week, IT got a good glimpse into the future of VMware and the journey that lies before us as we continue to extend virtualization across our data centers to more servers, more applications and more desktops. And there was lots of discussion (too much to share in any one blog) about what the rapid VM growth means from a business and IT perspective.
In fact, one of the stronger undercurrents of the show was around backup and recovery. There was lots of conversation – way more than in years past – about how to best protect data in this type of fast-growing environment and even how to leverage backup and recovery processes to actually enable more virtualization as my colleagues have discussed in previous blog posts (Manley/Biggar). And, no, we’re definitely not talking your grandmother’s backup anymore!
Today’s backup and recovery is all about performance, and integration is key to this. When VMware introduced vSphere 4 in 2009, it forever changed VM backup and recovery with its vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP), and now with vSphere 5, VMware continues the story. vSphere 5 adds network I/O control for finer granularity and multicast performance for higher throughput and CPU efficiency. Translation: Your backup and recovery is about to get a lot faster, and easier – if you’ve got the right backup architecture in place.
As VMware backup has evolved, EMC has been right there with timely support and integrations. EMC Avamar was the first backup application to take advantage of VADP, and that lock-step development tradition continues with vSphere 5. EMC Avamar and EMC NetWorker both supported vSphere 5 out of the gate, and we’re continuing to push the performance envelope with VMDK backup and restore.
EMC Avamar was the first deduplication backup software and system to leverage Changed Block Tracking (CBT) for faster backups. The engineering team did not stop there and quickly found a way to distribute backups across Proxy VMs throughout the virtual infrastructure to provide superior backup throughput. Now with Avamar 6.0, customers gain a 30x restore improvement as Avamar leverages CBT for restores – that’s right, CBT during restore means faster time to productivity. Avamar is able to quickly determine the changed blocks from the last backup and restores only those blocks to get your VM whole. This means you get your lost, deleted, or overwritten file back quickly and easily. No panic, no lost data, no lost productivity.
What will VMworld 2012 bring? I can’t wait.
by Phil George, Product Marketing Manager, Avamar
