A Contributed Article by Jay Woodruff, Product Marketing, AppAssure Software

According to Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), 61% of companies the research company surveyed in 2011 planned to replace their existing file/application-level backups with either a snapshot solution, replication solution or a combination of snapshot and replication. Legacy server backup schemes that use agent-based technology don't apply well in an all-virtual or a virtual/physical hybrid environment. At the same time, neither do agentless technologies found in first-generation VMware backup solutions.

New breed of agents to the rescue.

However a new breed of ultra-light ‘smart' agents promises to change VMware backup for the better, answering the need for a snapshot-based backup solution that's fast and works seamlessly across virtual and physical environments. This new breed combines the hands-off simplicity normally associated with agentless backup deployments with file- and object-level recovery granularity once associated only with agent-based backups. The end result is a single, all-encompassing backup solution that protects all of your machines regardless of whether they're administered locally, remotely or in the cloud. 

One approach for multiple environments.

If there's a downside to data protection practices in many IT environments, it involves situations where you are not just doing VMware backups, but backups for other hypervisors, and possibly some legacy physical machines. It's easier for you if your backup solution protects all the machines you own.

While most IT organizations have slowly grown multiple and unrelated backup schemes over time, the benefits of a unified approach with a single user interface are undeniable. To begin, it requires a lot less administrative effort to work a single pane of management glass for VMware backup and your other environments. And when it comes time to recover, the IT shop using a single interface can respond faster and more successfully in the face of a disaster. And a single product that does it all makes licensing much easier to administer. Fortunately new-generation backup technology like that described here allows you to accomplish all these things while reducing the amount of time you have to devote to backup in the first place.  

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Jay Woodruff is a journalist who began his career as a reporter for Computerworld . He evolved into a technology writer who has given voice to dozens of IT hardware and software companies prior to joining AppAssure Software, a backup, replication and recovery company acquired this year by Dell, Inc. He specifically focuses on virtualization for Dell AppAssure VMware backup, Microsoft Exchange backup, and Hyper-V backup and addresses how the latest image-level backup technology helps solve today's data protection challenges.