NovaStor, an international provider of award-winning backup solutions, has released the results from a survey of over 500 partners and power users in the small business marketplace, revealing intriguing results.

According to results of the survey, more than 66% of small business NovaBACKUP users are utilizing server virtualization with up to 80% planning to adopt the technology in the near future. These numbers continue to climb as businesses grow in size to over 100 employees. The average distribution of virtual servers vs. physical servers for these small businesses average around 38% for physical and 62% for virtual environments.

With perceived cost barriers for entry into virtualization technology rapidly dropping, small businesses are seizing the opportunity to reduce hardware and maintenance costs and further centralize company data protection.

Mike Andrews, Managing Director at NovaStor takes note of the small business virtualization trend, “NovaStor reseller partners are fielding requests for server consolidation projects, even from smaller businesses that may only have 3-5 servers. Protecting critical data during the migration process and implementing an affordable backup strategy is where NovaBACKUP is truly a valued asset.”

NovaStor Authorized and Certified Partners who sell to small businesses also show a burgeoning public acceptance of virtualization, with requests for server consolidation solutions on the rise. And with strengthened regulations regarding the protection of customer data and heightened awareness surrounding data protection, more clients are seeking out straightforward solutions that protect both physical and virtual environments. 

The overwhelming choice by partners for the protection of both physical and virtual data from a single application is the new NovaBACKUP Business Essentials 16, which showcases a variety of new virtualization features including:

• The NovaBACKUP Virtual Dashboard
• Single File Restore for Virtual Machines
• Virtual Machine Replication Functionality

Gauging the most exciting feature for NovaStor Partners in this release proved to be “Single File Restore” for virtual machines, allowing IT administrators to save valuable time by restoring only the files they need from Hyper-V and VMware backups. Now recovering individual files, subdirectories or entire drives from any virtual machine a simple task.