With a growing number of organizations planning to implement high-performance virtual servers, analysts have hailed agentless backup and recovery software as the premier choice for enabling backup and recovery of individual virtual servers within a single piece of hardware without the penalties associated with agent-based software.
According to IDC, the number of servers used to run virtual machines will increase significantly from 2005 to 2010. By 2010, 1.7 million physical servers will be shipped to run virtual machines, a threefold increase over 2005. This substantial increase in virtualized server environments is driving user demand for backup solutions designed to deal with the intricacies associated with backing up a physical server that may have up to 128 virtual machines to protect.
Popular Backup and Recovery Methods for Virtualized Servers
The backup and recovery methods most commonly used today to protect virtualized server environments don't provide the same level of capabilities available in physical server environments, unless compromises are made—such as backing up the entire physical server versus individual virtual machines.A variety of solutions have pieces of the overall solution needed for proper virtual machine backup but are lacking in terms of a comprehensive offering optimized for VM environments. For example, some solutions back up at the VM level but require users to purchase an agent for each virtual machine—a resource-intensive proposition—and, moreover, these applications are normally required to back up the entire virtual machine rather than the parts of the VM that change. Others lack support for backing up enterprise applications such as Oracle, SQL server and Exchange. Still others back up at the host level but place too burdensome a load on the host CPU resulting in degraded system performance, which is unacceptable for most organizations.
The Triumph of Televaulting
Asigra has delivered pro-virtualization agentless backup and recovery to virtual server environments for years. With 64-bit Televaulting, Asigra addresses the shortcomings of the current backup and recovery methods for protecting virtualized server environments by providing the following:• Agentless backup optimized for virtualized server environments. This architecture enables users to restore individual VM's in a virtualized server set without having to restore the entire set of servers in the event of single-server data loss or corruption. The agentless design saves time in implementing the backup and recovery process, and provides much faster and more granular recovery in the event of a failure.
• A pro-virtualization pricing model that is based on the amount of data to be protected, not the number of servers. Whereas many competitive backup products charge per agent or per server in order to provide server-specific backup/recovery, Asigra allows independent backup and recovery of each virtual server to deliver the most granular protection available without the excessive licensing management and cost penalty pricing issues of other solutions.
• Any-to-any restore capability (P2P, P2V, V2V, V2P) gives users the ability to back up server data from one vendor and restore the data to hardware from another vendor—an important capability in mixed computing enterprise and managed service provider environments. This allows users to back up physical servers and quickly restore to virtual servers for recovery purposes. And, once the physical server is repaired, the virtual server can then be restored to the physical server. Any-to-any backup is an important capability in mixed computing enterprise and managed service provider environments.
• Live VM backup allows administrators to back up VMs in the midst of production operations without disruption to production windows. Asigra's pre/post processors allow a smooth backup of a quiescent VM environment.
• Fast and simple implementation and management. Televaulting is an order of magnitude more efficient and faster than other backup solutions for virtual machines with native support for 32-bit and 64-bit environments.
• Centralized management of VM backup and recovery is essential in large distributed organizations that want to leverage the benefits of virtualized servers throughout the enterprise. Already the strongest remote office/branch office backup and recovery offering with centralized management a core offering, Asigra brings this capability to distributed virtual server environments whereby all backup and, more importantly, all restore operations can be managed from a single user interface without the need to physically be onsite to handle tapes.
• Compliance-ready VM backup that offers policy-based management, encryption, and near-instant recovery features for compliance with corporate policies and government regulations.
• File-level recovery at the VM and guest OS level extends mainstream backup abilities to virtual server environments.
• Bare-metal recovery and backup of data and enterprise applications such as Exchange, SQL Server, and Oracle at the VM level support DR planning.
"Asigra provides the most comprehensive backup offering for VMware," said Tom Dugan, co-founder of the VMware user group in Philadelphia. As an adjunct professor for Drexel University's executive-masters-in-IT program, Dugan instructs students on trends in information technology and sees virtualization as a key trend, but the infrastructure needs to exist to support the rollout of such technologies. "Until Asigra, there was no clear, comprehensive leader in virtual machine backup. With 64-bit Asigra Televaulting, the company provides users with a powerful backup solution to match the increasing performance and complexities of virtual server environments. There are two key features to Asigra's Televaulting offering as it pertains to Vmware—the ability to back up at the ESX Level without installing software agents which may otherwise disrupt the stability; and the ability of Asigra to back up only the block level changes of the VMDK files rather than the entire VM."
"Virtual server environments bring an added layer of complexity when it comes to backup," said Lauren Whitehouse, analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. "Asigra's agentless backup solution is definitely well equipped for this space, bringing a feature set that is positioning Asigra as a standout in VM backup."
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