By Fadi Albatal, FalconStor Software

As virtualization enters the mainstream and continues to spread across the data center to reach into primary workloads and applications, data protection has become one of the highest priorities of IT managers responsible for VMware deployments. But backing up and protecting virtualized servers has caused headaches and heartache for data center managers. 

There are several reasons why standard backup applications and concepts not only fail to address data protection needs of virtualized environments, but also exacerbate the availability and recoverability of such deployments. Traditional backups depend on patch jobs executed on a daily and weekly basis to copy data to secondary resources, such as disk or tape. These jobs require a fair amount of CPU and network resources that the virtualization infrastructure has already optimized for its utilization. So the backup process that typically took a long time to finish in the past will take much longer in a virtualized environment and may not even be possible.

For all the benefits VMware offers to the data center pursuing virtualization, it also requires an adequate data protection solution to overcome the recourse requirements of traditional backups. A transformation of data protection processes makes backup effortless, reliable and fast.  There are six questions you should raise with any vendor before selecting a third-party solution for VMware data protection and backup.

1. Is the technology open?  Is it ready to run on any operating system in a virtual machine, yet with full VMware vSphere integration?
2. Does it protect physical and virtual servers simultaneously, so you can safeguard workloads that are partially virtualized?
3. Can the solution meet your recovery time and recovery point objectives?
4. Does the solution ensure granular recovery of virtual machines, mission-critical databases, messaging data, files and even entire systems?
5. Are the data protection and recovery processes automated to minimize administrative tasks and human errors?
6. Can I leverage my existing infrastructure, and will it work with new technology I purchase in the future?

VMware has made virtualization a reality for businesses of all sizes, in all industries; but as these organizations mature their virtual environments and pursue aggressive data backup and recovery targets, they soon realize the need for tools that provide global data protection and recovery capabilities across different platforms.  In order to fully capture the return on investment in virtualization, these businesses should ask some key questions and investigate the kind of continuous data protection technology that will guard their most valuable data assets and ensure constant data and system availability.