Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman of Wikibon.org continue their VMworld 2012 coverage in this spotlight segment on backup and recovery for VMware customers and practitioners. Vellante and Miniman high-level overview examines industry trends concerning virtualization, the enduring utility of tape, backup stress and conclude with eight customer imperatives for backup and recovery.

Vellante and Miniman begin from the market angle, exploring how backup has evolved. Miniman cites that backup was the source of many pain points as users transitioned from a physical environment to virtualization. VMware is trying to keep up with competition by adding features into virtualization, especially in light of hypervisor commoditization.

Vellante notes, although tape is absolutely not the main media backup anymore, contrary to popular discussion, tape is not dead. Rather, it’s “the last resort, the deep archive.” Miniman adds that “Flash and disk are pushing tape further downstream…[but] as everything is additive and customers have multiple environments, tape is going to stay around for a while.”

Approximately 60% of applications running on x86 servers are virtualized now, which fosters virtual machine sprawl. This trend, combined with massive data growth, creates backup stress. Around 2010, VMware took storage APIs seriously, and,  part of that included Changed Block Tracking, which offered enhanced efficiency (by virtue of backing up only changes and not an entire volume). Vellante notes that VMware has done a good job of “encapsulating, abstracting, pooling and automating servers and memory.” Nevertheless, he adds, “These impediments like storage, like backup in particular, will slow the pace of virtualization adoption unless they’re addressed; so that’s what VMware is trying to do.”

A new announcement (made just this week) indicated that the free and included software appliance VDR, has been replaced by VDP, which is powered by Avamar’s source-side duplication capabilities that have been extremely reliable in virtualized environments. Miniman notes that this new and easy-to-use offering will help VMware reach the SMB market where they’ve wanted to expand.

Examining the technical angle, Vellante and Miniman, review the “Time Machine for the Enterprise” visual. Essentially, users can take snapshots of the data, shoot it through the LAN, reaching a disk-to-disk backup target or optional tape archive, then put it through the WAN for long-term backup or archiving. Miniman notes that VMware has an opportunity to intervene with their data protection in this regard, where Apple has fallen short with iCloud.

Vellante and Miniman conclude with reviewing eight customer imperatives for backup and recovery. Customers must reduce resource contention in virtual environments; recognize that sufficient backup must be coupled with efficient recovery (particularly concerning recovery times and recovery granularity); understand the level of VMware integration from backup vendors; plan on living in a multi-hypervisor world; maintain multiple backup solutions, but keep management consoles simple; note that snapshots will rapidly emerge as a primary means of protection; have a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy; tailor  backup strategy to the value of the data and applications to protect.