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.