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.
In the last 20 years, VMware vSphere has expanded from a nascent technology to a staple of data centers worldwide. Right alongside it, backup software that protects applications and data hosted on vSphere virtual machines (VMs) has experienced similar growth. Now as vSphere backup software enters its third decade of existence, new criteria exist for evaluating and selecting these solutions.
Everyone attending VMworld last week no doubt saw the slogan “Make Your Mark” predominantly displayed everywhere. Whether it was in the Moscone Center, the San Francisco airport or the highways and byways leading to downtown San Francisco, VMware sought to make an impression on attendees. Having now left VMworld 2019, perhaps the most indelible mark that VMware left on me and other attendees was its intentions to make Kubernetes a center piece in its future offerings.
When organizations deploy HCI at scale (more than eight nodes in a single logical configuration), cracks in its architecture can begin to appear unless organizations carefully examine how well it scales. On the surface, high end and standard hyper-converged architectures deliver the same benefits. They each virtualize compute, memory, storage networking, and data storage in a simple to deploy and manage scale-out architecture. They support standard hypervisor platforms. They provide their own data protection solutions in the form of snapshots and replication. In short, these two architectures mirror each other in many ways. However, high-end and standard HCI solutions differ in functionality in ways that primarily surface in large virtualized deployments.
A virtualization focused backup software play may be perceived as “too little, too late” with so many players in today’s backup space. However, many former virtualization centric backup software plays (PHD Virtual and vRanger come to mind) have largely disappeared while others got pricier and/or no longer do just VM backups. These changes have once again created a need for a virtualization centric backup software solution. This plays right into the hands of the newly created HYCU as it formally tackles the job of ESX virtual machine (VM) backups in non-Nutanix shops.
Every vendor new to a market generally starts by introducing a product that satisfies a niche to gain a foothold in that market. Comtrade Software exemplified this premise by earlier this year coming to market with its HYCU software that targets the protection of VMs hosted on the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. But to grow in a market, especially in the hyper-competitive virtual machine (VM) data protection space, one must expand to protect all market-leading hypervisors. Comtrade Software’s most recent HYCU release achieves that goal with its new support for VMware ESX.
In recent months and years, many have come to question VMware’s commitment to public clouds and containers used by enterprise data centers (EDCs). No one disputes that VMware has a solid footprint in EDCs and that it is in no immediate danger of being displaced. However, many have wondered how or if it will engage with public cloud providers such as Amazon as well as how it would address threats posed by Docker. At VMworld 2017, VMware showed new love for these two technologies that should help to alleviate these concerns.
Today organizations more so than ever are looking to move to software-defined data centers. Whether they adopt software-defined storage, networking, computing, servers, security, or all of them as part of this initiative, they are starting to conclude that a software-defined world trumps the existing hardware defined one. While I agree with this philosophy in principle, organizations need to carefully dip their toe into the software-defined waters and not dive head-first.
In today’s business world where new technologies constantly come to market, there are signs that indicate when certain ones are gaining broader market adoption and ready to go mainstream. Such an event occurred this month when a backup solution purpose built for Nutanix was announced by Comtrade Software.
Every year at VMworld I have conversations that broaden my understanding and appreciation for new products on the market. This year was no exception as I had the opportunity to talk at length with Fidel Michieli, a System Architect at a SaaS provider, who shared his experiences with me about his challenges with backup and recovery and how he came to choose Cohesity. In this first installment in my interview series with Fidel, he shared the challenges that his company was facing with his existing backup configuration as well as the struggles that he had in identifying a backup solution that scaled to meet his dynamically changing and growing environment.
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