Backup for VMware systems is one hot market. You’d think backup is just backup, but VMware is a specialized beast that requires specialized software.
One vendor in this space is NAVIKO which this week announced its NAKIVO Backup & Replication v3.9 Beta. The software supports self-service, multi-tenancy and dynamic license allocation.
This set of features is music to an MSP and hosting provider’s ears, and can support backup, disaster recovery, Replication-as-a-Service (RaaS) and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS). With multi-tenancy service providers can support multiple customers, and for customers with multiple business units there is a single view of the entire storage infrastructure.
Self-service is of use to MSP and customer alike. The MSP can give clients view-only access, or offer full admin rights if so needed. This is especially useful when it comes to recovering files, which the customer can do themselves. Finally the dynamic license allocation lets service providers shift licenses from one tenant to another.
The software, now is beta, is due sometime this year.
“With multi-tenancy, self-service, and dynamic license allocation in NAKIVO Backup & Replication v3.9, cloud service providers and enterprises can protect virtualized environments more easily, reliably, and cost effective,” said Bruce Talley, CEO and Co-founder, NAKIVO Inc. "NAKIVO Backup & Replication with the industry's lowest TCO, highest performance, and most intuitive interface can enable Cloud Service Providers to offer new services, BaaS, RaaS, DRaas, and BCaaS for VMware vSphere ESXi environments with higher margins and greater customer satisfaction.”
The rise of VMware gave birth to a whole new class of storage vendors with products specifically designed for virtual environments. The idea behind these tools is that traditional backup tools were designed to protect physical, not virtual machines, and making them do the latter was a kludge at best.
The next wave in this area is to have purpose-built VM backup, but deploy it in the cloud. This way you are using virtual technology to backup virtual machines.
NAKIVO is far from the only player in the space. TwinStrata and Veeam are also worth note.
TwinStrata Makes its Play
TwinStrata’s main tool here is CloudArray, which now comes in the form of CloudArray Disaster Recovery as a Service (CloudArray DRaaS).
This is actually a new piece to CloudArray “that delivers seamless disaster recovery (DR) for VMware users on-demand without requiring continuous investment in secondary infrastructure or sites,” the company said.
TwinStrata looked at the disaster recovery market for VMware and found it wanting, at least as far as the cloud is concerned. “Cloud-based DR alternatives for VMware environments have been limited by incompatibility and difficult administration, often requiring third-party conversion, migration and/or backup tools,” the company argued.
Check out these TMC TwinStrata videos:
http://www.tmcnet.com/tmc/videos/default.aspx?vid=6631
http://www.tmcnet.com/tmc/videos/default.aspx?vid=4718
The Veeam Story
Veeam was one of the earliest to spot the need for VMware backup and restore. The Veeam tool can recover an entire server, a process most of us know “bare metal restores.” It can also do file level restoration, or provide disaster recovery by replicating VMs.
Cloud Storage on the Move
Cloud storage and backup is growing like crazy, and part of that is scalability. Typical storage densities are growing about 20 percent a year. While that may seem impressive, it pales in comparison to the need for capacity, which Gartner says is growing 40-60 percent annually. That gap is driving substantial cloud storage growth.
According to MarketsandMarkets, the total cloud storage market is expected to reach $46.8 billion by 2018 with a CAGR of 40.2 percent.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
