Your environment: You must consider your existing infrastructure before shopping for supplementary solutions. In order to reduce cost and spare waste, you should look for open technology that is ready to run on any operating system in a virtual machine, yet with full VMware vSphere integration. Open technology also delivers peace of mind that anything you purchase for the data center in the future will tie in seamlessly with your DR solution. And finally, if your data center runs physical and virtual servers simultaneously, you need to ensure anything you purchase is capable of safeguarding workloads that are only partially virtualized.
Your resources: Unless you have infinite resources in staff and money – and who does? – look for backup and DR solutions that automate as many tasks as possible. Minimizing administrative tasks not only lessens the burden on your staff, it also reduces the risk for human error.
Your goals: Have your recovery time objective and recovery point objective in mind before you begin evaluating backup and recovery packages. You should also note whether the options you’re considering will ensure granular recovery of virtual machines, mission-critical databases, messaging data, files, and even entire systems.
As virtualization spreads to encompass primary workloads and applications, data protection has become the main concern for those working in VMware environments. Comprehensive data protection solutions fill the void left by traditional backup and make recovery an effortless, reliable, and quick process for data centers that deploy the right solutions for their needs.
