Veeam VP of Product Strategy Doug  Hazelman and newly-arrived Actifio VP of Product Marketing Brian Reagan joined Wikibon co-founder David Vellante in TheCUBE at VMworld 2012 to discuss the challenges and their respective approaches to the hurdles of data management and protection in virtualized environments.

The conversation started with Reagan, and his description of Actifio’s pitch, which basically boils down to “[Apple’s] Time Machine for the enterprise.” Most enterprises still maintain the mentality of putting data on a tape, putting that tape on a truck, and having that truck go somewhere far away. But that approach causes a huge data creep, as enterprises find that every byte of data is duplicated over and over again, causing strain on the storage infrastructure. Instead, Actifio provides a “gold master image” that can be used to restore an environment to production from days or weeks in the past – not months.

Meanwhile, the more established Veeam, as you may guess from the name, focuses much more specifically on virtualized environments. Once you start deploying agents into VMs, Veeam’s Hazelman tells TheCUBE, the traditional backup approach starts to break down. It’s on Veeam and its portfolio to help customers manage and protect their virtualized data across VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

Something that both Veeam and Actifio agree on is that the market for data protection is changing. Tape is definitely on its way out, but as Hazelman points out, a SAN snapshot isn’t a true backup since it can be affected by natural disaster or human error. Instead, Veeam works by combining hypervisor-level snapshots with native SAN recovery capabilities for true virtualization-layer backup, removing strain on the infrastructure. Snapshots alone may give quick RPO, but they’re not safe backups. Backups are only backups when they’re off-site.

Meanwhile, Actifio’s Reagan agreed with our Vellante that “invisible” is the new paradigm for backup. NetApp’s had the “snapshot” model of backup available for ten years now, but no enterprise wanted to incur the cost of storing all those snapshots that the old model demanded. Actifio uses a virtual imaging system that allows for a restore point without having to duplicate the data.

Finally, Amazon Glacier came up as it often has at VMworld – and apparently, Veeam sees it as a direct threat to the tape industry, saying that the guys who drive the tape trucks are going to have to find new jobs soon, given Glacier’s threat to the bare-level archiving market.

For more insights from Actifio and Veeam, check out the full conversation here: