Browsing Posts in vBackup

Reading Time: 3 minutesDell announced the acquisition of AppAssure, a global technology leader in back-up and recovery software that protects a company’s entire application infrastructure (for more info see the company web site). The acquisition of AppAssure’s product portfolio, R&D, patent portfolio, and sales and servicing functions add data protection and recovery IP to Dell’s storage solutions offerings. Data protection and recovery is a $3.6 billion business segment projected to grow 7% per year. Some interesting aspects of AppAssure backup solutions is that they are multi-hypervisor (actually only VMware and Hyper-V), can handle also physical systems as well […]

Reading Time: 2 minutesAs written in the previous post related to the upgrade to vSphere 5, the old VCB framework can still be used also with latest version, but is a not supported configuration (I’ve made the test only with a Windows Server 2008 R2 for the VCB proxy, but I suppose that works also with previous OS). Of course the SAN transport mode could not work (or not if you use VMFS5), but the NBD works as on the old vSphere 4.x. The only issue that I get (but honestly I’ve make only few tests) is on […]

Reading Time: 3 minutesOne curios thing of both ExaGrid and Dell DR4000 solutions (but also other solutions) is that they lack of a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) feature and only work as a network share (with CIFS or NFS). In both cases the reason was not technical (but I think that the main reason is still just a way to reduce cost and complexity) but marketing/strategy (customers just don’t ask at this feature). But moving from a backup to tape (B2T) to a backup to disk (B2D) solution does not necessary mean move to backup to file (over […]

LTO Tapes

Reading Time: 3 minutesSeveral new solutions seem demonstrate that backup destination is moving from tape to disk. It isn’t really a new trend of last year (for example see this paper from Lisa 2006, or Microsoft that has removed the tape support in his OS included backup solution starting from Windows Vista), but now more products are pointing to the disk solution. The Linear Tape Open (LTO) consortium (whose member include Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Quantum) has officially released specifications for the LTO Generation 5 with around 1,5 TB of native capacity and a throughput of 140MBps (uncompressed)… and […]

Reading Time: 4 minutesThe new Dell DR4000 Advanced Disk Backup and Disaster Recovery Solution was lauched during the last Dell Storage Forum and can optimize data management while reducing reliance on tape backups. The new Dell DR4000 Storage Platform which combines the performance and reliability of disk-based backup with innovative deduplication and compression capabilities from Dell’s Ocarina Networks acquisition. The DR4000 will compete directly with the EMC Data Domain DD160, Quantum DXi4000, Hewlett-Packard D2D StoreOnce, and ExaGrid’s EX Series. Before this product, Dell has sold EMC Data Domain solutions or specific backup vendor solutions, now it start to play in this market (as also reported in […]

Reading Time: 3 minutesWhen the vSphere infrastructure is upgraded, than also the backup part needs a check (and maybe a refresh). But, in order to avoid big issue, is better check it also before the entire upgrade, just to be sure that all remain supported. I also suggest to use this as a potential review of the the entire backup policies to find how to improve them and/or how to use different solutions (not necessary different products). About the backup programs, most of them could still work with vSphere, because the vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) are […]

Reading Time: 3 minutesFor a list of all objectives see the VCP5 page. Objective 5.5 – Backup and Restore Virtual Machines See also: Objective 5.5 – Backup and Restore Virtual Machines and Objective 5.5 – Backup and Restore Virtual Machines. Identify snapshot requirements (similar as vSphere 4.x) See the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide (page 208) and VMware KB: Understanding virtual machine snapshots in VMware. Note that snapshots provide a point-in-time image of the disk that backup solutions can use, but Snapshots are not meant to be a robust method of backup and recovery. If the files containing a […]

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