Posts by NancyHurley

Re: Centralized solution for monitoring all locations for back ups at the same time

@erikf- While I realize this forum is not meant for vendor "commercials" and I generally refrain from that , seeing you asked and you seem to really need something to help better monitor and manage Backup Exec 2012- I will suggest taking a look at Bocada vpConnect. Bocada does centralized monitoring and reporting on Backup Exec 2012 (and previous versions) - the solution can monitor all backup activity from multiple servers, report on it in a central location for easy troubleshooting and policy analysis. It's web based , so multiple users can access the reports from any location, you can set alerts on errors and in general get a much better view to what's going on. If you are using the VM API integration- vpConnect can also correlate all vCenter information with the Backup Exec activity to give you a much deeper understanding of whats going on with your VM backups. Obviously happy to provide more info www.bocada.com/products

Re: Is data protection really heading towards consolidation?

With all the advances in data protection for virtual machines, there is really no reason that any organization should be using "traditional" backup methods for VMs. While we see a number of organizations still protecting VMs as they would physical machines, the general intent is to move towards applications that do integrate with the VM APIs- today products like Veeam and vRanger have done very well in this space, but the incumbent vendors (Symantec, IBM) are certainly catching up. But even if an organization chooses two disparate backup solutions for virtual and physical data protection, or a single solution that supports both- new challenges are going to be introduced when trying to manage the virtual data protection environment.

It is much easier to "orphan" a VM (not have a backup policy associated with the machine) seeing it is easier for others in the organization to spin up VMs without informing the backup admin. Conversely, a VM can be easily over-protected when snapshots and backups are being run against a VM, wasting capacity and potential hogging datastore resources. A view into policy configuration is critical in such a dynamic environment. So while organizations should take advantage of all the features virtualization specific backup applications have to offer- they need to make sure they keep a keen eye on management issues or there may be problems with recovery and resource costs.