DCIG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the inaugural 2022-23 DCIG TOP 5 Large Enterprise VMware vSphere Backup Solutions report. This report unveils the TOP 5 large enterprise backup solutions that organizations should consider for protecting their applications, data, and workloads hosted on VMware vSphere.
VMware vSphere Leads in Enterprise Server Virtualization
Analyst market reports that track server virtualization software indicate it will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. These reports also find VMware vSphere maintains its lead as the server virtualization platform large enterprises most use.
Server virtualization in general and VMware vSphere specifically have transformed how enterprises manage their physical infrastructure. Used to host multiple applications on a single physical machine, vSphere simultaneously lowers costs while increasing operational efficiency.
VMware also makes multiple tools available to complement vSphere to assist large enterprises in deploying and managing it. Consider:
- VMware’s vRealize Suite visualizes virtual infrastructures to create and simplify virtual workflows within enterprises.
- VMware vSphere High Availability and Fault Tolerance help enterprises create and maintain virtual data centers with uninterrupted 24x7x365 availability.
These tools and others from VMware position large enterprises to create stable, high performing virtual infrastructures. However, they must still protect the virtual machine (VM) applications, data, and workloads hosted on VMware vSphere. This necessitates they acquire backup software specifically tuned for this task.
Attributes of Large Enterprise VMware vSphere Backup Solutions
Large enterprise VMware vSphere backup solutions capitalize on specific features VMware offers to back up and recover virtual machines (VMs). These include VMware vCenter integration and leveraging its vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection (VADP) and Storage vMotion features, among others. Attributes that help distinguish large enterprise backup solutions from those that target smaller size businesses and enterprises include:
- Leverage VADP in VM backup and recovery. All large enterprise backup solutions universally incorporate VADP into their VMware vSphere backup offering. Backup solutions targeted at smaller environments certainly can and do support VADP. However, organizations must first confirm the solution does support it and how they implement it.
- Protect the data of VMware-specific applications. VMware offers multiple software tools to help large enterprises orchestrate and manage their virtual infrastructure. These include tools such as vCenter Server, vRealize Orchestrator, and vSphere with Tanzu Objects, among others. These tools create their own application data. All these backup solutions offer options to protect data stored in one or more of these VMware-specific applications.
- Support for multiple types of backup media targets. Ransomware’s prevalence has forced enterprises to rethink how and where they store their backup data. Ransomware attacks may target backup software and its backup data stores. These attacks may put backup data stored on direct- and/or network-attached disk storage at risk. All large enterprise backup solutions help mitigate this risk by supporting multiple other backup media targets. These include object storage in public and private clouds and potentially tape. Stored on these alternative media types, backup software can take advantage of the data immutability features they offer.
Large Enterprise VMware vSphere Backup Solutions
DCIG identified over 30 solutions suitable for protecting applications, data, and workloads on VMware vSphere. Of these, DCIG identified twelve of them as meeting DCIG’s definition of a large enterprise VMware vSphere backup solution. The general categories under which the features evaluated for these solutions fell included:
- Backup administration
- Backup capabilities
- Configuration, licensing, and pricing
- Recovery and restore
- Service and support
Based on these criteria, DCIG awarded the following large enterprise VMware vSphere backup solutions a TOP 5 ranking (in alphabetical order):
- Cobalt Iron Compass
- Commvault Complete™ Data Protection
- HYCU for VMware
- Unitrends Unified BCDR
- Veritas NetBackup
Report Availability
The full 2022-23 DCIG TOP 5 report is available for download immediately at the links below. The full report contains additional details such as:
- A listing of all twelve solutions evaluated
- An overview of common features across all large enterprise VMware Enterprise backup solutions
- More attributes that all large enterprise VMware vSphere backup solutions share
- An examination on some of the differences between the TOP 5 solutions
- A profile of each solution that highlights the ways each one distinguishes itself from the other TOP 5 solutions
Third party sites at which the full 2022-23 DCIG TOP 5 Large Enterprise VMware vSphere Backup Solutions report are available:
Cobalt Iron: TOP 5 report link
HYCU: TOP 5 report link
Confidentiality and Copyright
Other than excerpts from this report published in this announcement, the contents of the 2022-23 DCIG TOP 5 Large Enterprise VMware vSphere Backup Solutions report are copyrighted and may not be republished without permission. Individuals may access the full report at no cost by following one of the above links.
DCIG will release more TOP 5 reports in the weeks, months, and years to come.
Please sign up for the weekly DCIG Newsletter to receive notice of their availability.