Pure-play virtualisation backup and recovery - or mixed approach?
Veeam and Vision reveal different strategies
By Maxwell Cooter | Techworld | Published: 13:13, 22 October 2010
How should users within virtualised environments back up their systems? Should they turn to a virtualisation pure play supplier or should they turn to a software vendor who can support both physical and virtualised products.
Two companies who represent the different viewpoints have both released their latest products trying to capture the hearts and minds of virtualisation users.
Vision Solutions, which bought Double Take Software in July this year, has been busy bringing the two companies' products together and rebranding their offerings said Bill Hammond, Vision's director of product marketing. "We're addressing the high amount of virtualisation out there. Our products have been engineered to live in the physical and virtual world and move back and forth between them."
On the other hand, Veeam's approach has been wholly focused on virtualisation. The company has released Veeam Backup and Replication 5 – promising that will provide an impetus for companies looking to virtualise their critical applications.
The company claimed that Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0 could run a virtual machine direct from a compressed and deduplicated backup file on regular backup storage, enabling users to recover a virtual machine straight from a backup, restore individual objects from any virtualised application, and automatically verify the recoverability of every backup without additional hardware or staff.
Vision's Double-Take product suite takes advantage of VMware vSphere 4.1's Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS) feature, allowing users to realise simplified virtual machine networking and take advantage of DVS capabilities while maintaining Double-Take protection of their virtual machines.
For Vision, it's important to straddle both physical and virtualised worlds. "We did a survey and found while 90 percent of the top 1000 enterprises were virtualising, only about 20 percent of the smaller companies were. Because we live in the physical and virtual worlds – our competitors can't handle this - the expertise we bring to the failover world means that we can deal with both sides, physical and vertical," said Hammond.
Veeam, which won the best in show and best technology award sat the recent VMworld for its product, sees the product as an incentive towards more virtualisation. "By virtualising enterprise applications on VMware vSphere™ and using Veeam Backup & Replication v5, organisations can overcome the limitations of traditional backup and gain fast, flexible and reliable recovery of critical applications," explained Ratmir Timashev, Veeampresident and CEO. "This includes databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server and email systems such as Microsoft Exchange."
