Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014.  Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed article by Jarrett Potts, director of strategic marketing for STORServer

2014 predictions for data protection of virtual ones and zeros

Virtual systems protected in the cloud

As 2013 winds down, we are seeing a greater adaption of virtual technology that enables data and applications to be more mobile and flexible. Your mail server is no longer directly tied to a vendor's hardware, and instead, can be moved from machine to machine with little to no downtime. This allows users to keep data in the fastest and safest way possible.

Recent advancements allow data to now be replicated and managed in a cloud. In 2014, you will start to see a shift towards virtual data protection, or the ability to replicate virtual hosts to a service provider. This provides many new features that will start to become more mainstream, such as: 

• Backup to the cloud
• Decommissioning to the cloud
• Disaster recovery to the cloud

Virtual mobility and flexibility

With advances in replication and cloud, you will begin to see how your virtual environments have become more mobile. You will see companies that have data in virtual environments that are available in many places at any given time.

A great example of this is a production environment that is protected with your data protection solution and could be copied and brought up under a new hostname for training purposes on a weekly basis. This test machine could be brought up in any environment at any time and location.

Virtual machine management

Virtual machines are transient by their very nature. Some are up only for hours or days while others are up for long periods of time. This presents a real problem for system administrators. How do they manage hosts in an environment where it takes only a few minutes to bring up a new server and to bring it down? How does a system administrator keep up with all the changes and decide what data to protect and what data is trash?

In 2014, you will see further integration of host management into data protection solutions. For example, when a server is decommissioned today, the host is shut off but the image of the host still resides on physical disk somewhere in the environment. If you are not going to restart the host, at some point, it needs to be removed from the environment's disk and archived off to some non-production media, such as tape.

You will see virtual software start including in the "hooks" from the API to better manage their hosts for long periods of time, and thus, allow data protection vendors enhanced access to the policies that allow better long-term management and protection. A good example of this would be the decommissioning of hosts automatically. When a host is not used for a pre-determined amount of time, VMWare or the like will automatically archive and delete them from the ESX server.

Tape will not die

Finally, in 2014, you will not see tape die. The people who say tape is dead are the same people who told us UNIX was dead. Tape is way too portable and inexpensive to die. It will continue to grow in size and cost less per megabyte and terabyte.

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About the Author

Jarrett Potts, director of strategic marketing for STORServer, a leading provider of proven data backup solutions for the mid-market. Before joining the STORServer team, Potts spent the past 15 years working in various capacities for IBM, including Tivoli Storage Manager marketing and technical sales. He has been the evangelist for the TSM family of products since 2000. His breadth of experience includes administering IT systems, including desktop support, small networks, backbone infrastructure, storage management and remote access for corporations and ISPs.