It’s been a while since we’ve talked a bit a bout esXpress‘ features. In this post we’ll be looking at the “Date Smart Dynamic Export”, which allows you to pinpoint the virtual data you want to archive, and combine it with your physical backup data.

Utilizing Patent Pending technology, esXpress’ Date Smart Dynamic Export (an extensive set of pre-defined date categories), provides a seamless path for moving uncompressed, native VMDK and VMX files to tape when combined with traditional solutions such as Symantec Backup Exec, IBM TSM, EMC Legato, or HP Data Protector. Since the esXpress software is not required to run restores, future restoration from tape is fast and easy.

The Optimal Combination for the Future of Data Protection

Today’s system administrator must protect the systems they’re responsible for with the best software available. esXpress in coordination with existing backup solutions, yields a faster data to tape backup, creating the optimal combination for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.

VMs are moved to disk by esXpress and then tape backup can occur during normal business hours as no production VMs are affected. Tape data consists of VMs in their native state, consuming fewer tapes (up to 50%) and fewer resources associated with tapes (off-site storage fees, tape costs, and legacy agent licensing). Reduction in virtual machine backup times, together with faster restoration and reduced costs, represents the future of data protection.

Disaster Recovery tools such as NetBackup, BackupExec, TSM, Data Protector, Networker, Avamar, CommVault, Arcserve and others, provide effective protection against data loss, however, as virtualization progresses through the corporate environment, new backup tools are required. esXpress complements your existing DR implementation with the best Virtual to Disk Backup & Disaster Recovery solution in the industry.

Agent-Based Solutions and Tape Storage: The Shortcomings

Agent-based backup solutions solve critical needs in the current IT landscape. These solutions effectively quiesce applications while allowing users to continue to use those mission-critical applications on the physical server. Data stored on physical hosts must be protected and applications such as file servers, databases, and messaging, each povide unique challenges when it comes to backup.

Currently, the most cost-effective, off-site, backup storage medium is tape. And mature, agent-based backup solutions efficiently move data from disk to tape. While tape is not as fast for restoration as disk may be, tapes have the benefit of assuring backups are not on the physical premises in case of a disaster. Unfortunately, though, agent-based technologies have not been able to grow with virtualization. Recovery of an entire system with an agent-based backup preserves only the data—the entire system must be reloaded—including the operating system, applications, and the agent before any data can be restored.

Data Center DR: Best-of-Breed Solution

esXpress and legacy backup solutions work together to provide a best of breed solution for data center disaster recovery. Though legacy solutions provide effective backup of physical servers, as well as disk-to-tape solutions, esXpress provides the fastest backups from virtual machines to disk. Utilizing our date smart export directory, esXpress provides a direct path for legacy backups to take uncompressed native VMDK and VMX files to tape. Future restoration from tape is quick and easy as the esXpress software is not required for the restoration.

To achieve the lowest time-to-restoration in a virtual environment, block level backups utilizing VCB are often deployed. Unfortunately, VCB requires additional hardware and can not provide the number of concurrent streams necessary to meet backup windows.

Backups in a virtual environment should be performed with a solution tailored to the emerging virtualization technology. esXpress utilizes virtual machines to provide up to 16 concurrent backup streams direct to target per ESX host. Utilizing virtual machines requires no additional hardware or software licensing, and provides a superior level of fault-tolerance. In addition, each backup stream is compressed and deduplicated before the data ever leaves the host.

This story first appeared on Virtualization.info today.

Last week the authoritative news service of Dow Jones reported that Microsoft Hyper-V now has 24% of the virtualization market share.

The claim comes from Microsoft itself, specifically from Kevin Turner, the company COO, that said:

"We launched our first product in October of this past year. From then till now, we gained 24 points of market share against a very, very formidable competitor."



VMware didn’t provide an official reply to Dow Jones, but answered to the virtualization.info inquiry by saying that there’s no evidence they are aware of to support this statement.

There’s lots of speculation as to whether this is “actually true”. If it is the case this would be a giant leap for Microsoft. Last time somebody checked the reports were pretty different:

• In March 2008 Gartner reported that the Microsoft market share was equal to 7%.
• In October 2008 IDC reported that the Microsoft market share was equal to 23%, but that number was obtained by aggregating the distribution of Hyper-V and Virtual Server

View the full post here: http://virtualization-spotlight.com/microsoft-claims-hyper-v-has-24-virtualization-market-share/

PHD Virtual’s product esXpress now has a group on LinkedIn called the “Official esXpress Virtual Backup Group“.

The group is sporting some top names in the virtualization community also!

esXpress radically alters the notion of how to protect data in virtual infrastructures in one simple way: It uses the virtual infrastructure to back itself up!

This innovative approach enables esXpress to provide best of breed data protection functions without the use of VCB, Proxy Servers or VM Agents.

My post for today post takes us back to September 2008. The Secondlight Blog wrote a great article called “Wine vs Virtualization” in which they looked at the possability of using VirtualBox on Ubuntu to run windows applications; namely CounterStrike and *World of Warcraft*!

The full article is here, and is really worth a read.

Post also available here: http://virtualization-spotlight.com/