VADP and long term access

[swadm]

As users of EMC Legato Networker we are still using classical host backup with NetWorker Virtual Edition Client - VCB clearly had too many restrictions to be attractive for us.

VADP sounds promising, but will we be able to recover data many years later, when VMWare will have desupported VADP and rolled out XVADP or whatever?

Would an admin that has VCB backups on tapes be able to recover them on vCenter 5.0 hosts?

Thanks for sharing your opinion on this.

Regards, Tom

[rash127]

Hi Tom,

  This is a great question. I think the confusion is coming from the misunderstanding as to what really VCB and VADP are. These are simply methods to create snapshots and move data from primary storage to backup storage. The reality is that VCB and VADP are the same under the hood (except, of course VADP is the next generation), the delivery of the APIs is where they look different. VCB was the method of delivering APIs through VMware provided CLI based tools while VADP made those APIs directly available to backup software vendors. I wrote a blog on VADP here: http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/MrVray/2012/02/18/where-do-i-download-vadp

  I cannot speak for EMC NetWorker in particular as it started supporting VADP very late. Since I know NetBackup, I can say that it provides the capability to restore VCB based backups to vSphere 4 and 5 environments.

Warm regards,

Rasheed