Easily one of the most revolutionary changes to IT over the past few years has been server virtualization.
If I wasn’t a backup-dude (23 years), then I would be a virtualization-guy (10+) – so I was very excited to conduct a research project at ESG specifically around the Trends for Protecting Highly Virtualized and Private Cloud Environments.
From my perspective: “Highly Virtualized” implies over 50% of production servers are virtualized, with plans continuing into the 70% and beyond range – while “Private Cloud” is when you take the highly-virtualized environment that is yielding consolidated resources, and add the management capabilities that enable elasticity, resiliency, self-service provisioning, etc.
Earlier in 2013 for this report, we took a fresh look at:
What hypervisor(s) are in use today and planned. And for multi-hypervisor environments, why were they and what were their future plans.
What backup products (software and hardware) were being used to protect physical servers – including what methods were being used to supplement those backups (e.g. snapshots, replication, etc.)
Then, we asked those same questions for VMware environments; and asked them again for Hyper-V environments – not only looking at the backup software (separate vs unified), but again what other methods were they using for protecting their virtual infrastructure, in supplement to their backups.
What was their adoption of Private Cloud technologies – and what were their staffing plans around virtualization, private cloud, backup and BC/DR.
And for those using separate/unified backup solutions – were they planning on staying that way, or switching, and why.
There are some great insights in that data – and I am really excited about telling those stories for the remainder of 2013 and into 2014 … check out the ESG Report, Trends in Protecting Highly Virtualized Environments.
In the meantime, here are some of my previous virtualization protection pieces:
Video: Trends in Virtualization Protection
Blog: VMworld 2012, Wrap-up on Backup
Blog: On ‘the Cube’ discussing VMworld 2012 and backup
ESG Brief: What to look for in Virtualization Protection
Blog: What I am looking for at VMworld 2012
Blog: Agent best-practices for Host-based Backups
Blog: What IT Pros should look for in Virtualization Protection
As always, thanks for reading.
Originally posted on my personal self-managed blog while at ESG (TechnicalOptimist.com), reposted on DPM for archival reference. Broken links are likely due to ESG content being dropped between its acquisition by TechTarget and their acquisition by Omdia.