Yesterday EMC entertained us all with their “Backup to the Future” launch of updates to their data protection products. As is their habit, they opened their web event with a costly yet cheesy film that conveyed absolutely nothing of value. But that’s why big companies have marketing departments.
What I’m more interested in are their claims to be taking backup into the future. A future that Syncsort has had for quite some time already.
In particular, I want to focus on their new “Instant Access” virtual machine recovery. (For what it’s worth, Syncsort has used the term Instant Access for several years – imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!)
This new feature allows you to boot a virtual machine from a backup image, stored on a Data Domain or Avamar box. Hmmm, what a clever idea. Kind of like Syncsort’s Instant Virtualization feature that’s been around for five years.
Of course, with Syncsort’s NSB solution the target storage is a NetApp FAS, and we use NetApp FlexClone™ technology to boot the VM. So we are using a hardware platform that is not a single-purpose backup box, but a multi-purpose disk device.
But what about after you boot the VM? How do you get it back to production storage? Well to quote from an EMC video, “the VMware administrator can easily initiate a storage vMotion operation.” Of course, vMotion the VM back to production! What a smart idea. Perhaps that’s why Syncsort has long had this process automated so as to not require the intervention of the VMware administrator, or anyone else. It’s absolutely seamless and automatic as part of the recovery.
Oh, one other thing about Syncsort’s Instant Virtualization. It works on physical machines too. That’s right, you can not only boot up a backed up VM, you can instantly transform a physical server backup into a VM and boot it in minutes!
A final point. EMC made a lot of fuss about how all their backups can now, finally, go to a one backup target rather than a mish-mash of hardware platforms. Great idea, which is why at Syncsort we unified backup of any storage environment to a NetApp target device in….2005!
Seems the future arrived at Syncsort a little ahead of EMC’s schedule!
For EMC, the Future Arrived Late is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.
