2012 Prediction: AppAssure

Trends for Backup in 2012

Virtualization adoption is growing faster than ever at over 5x in 3 years according to Gartner. Private and public cloud adoption is growing just as fast. Because data protection in ever-increasing virtualized and cloud environments is becoming a complex area and because complexity is compounding due to hybrid IT environments, there will be 3 key trends for 2012.

Unified Backup Virtual & Physical and Unified Backup With Replication!

For the last few years, backup products were either piecemeal or retrofitted to support virtual machines. Then various first generation VM backup tools appeared on the market which claimed to do a better job of backing up VMs. But the adoption of virtualization is mixed in hybrid, virtual and physical environments and requires more than just legacy backup or first generation VMware backup tools. A truly unified data protection strategy is critical instead of a hodgepodge of special backup tools. A unified backup product is necessary to be cost-effective while fully taking advantage of the benefits of virtualization (and cloud too) while still protecting physical environments.

Unified, Multi-Hypervisor Support for Heterogeneous Environments!

In many technology surveys, IT administrators say that they are planning to use not only VMware but also Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer. With such a wide range of hypervisor options, this year’s backup and replication products must evolve to support multi-hypervisor environments. Again, they must be truly unified to protect these heterogeneous environments. First generation VMware backup tools were limited by their support for single hypervisors.

Assurance and Reliability of Recoverability

IT departments will be tasked with ensuring 100% recoverability of their servers. Legacy backup tools fell short of ensuring 100% recoverability of backup files and required companies to run regular, manual backup drills. Key to the evolution of backup, especially for a virtualized environment, will be the automatic testing and verification of backups for 100% reliability of recoverability or assurance of recoverability. This assurance of recoverability must ensure that not only the backup file is recoverable but also that the actual applications that were backed up.