It is hard to believe when we think about the evolution of backup that it began on magnetic tape devices in the 1950s and 1960s, and those backups were made by physically duplicating the tape onto another.
As computers became more powerful and storage devices became more advanced, new methods for backing up data were developed. In the 1970s and 1980s, floppy disks and hard drives began to be used for storing data, and software was developed to automate the process of making backups. This is arguably when technology and backup advancements really took off.
In the 1990s, network-based storage and backup solutions became more common, allowing multiple computers to share the same data and backup resources to protect their information. With the rise of cloud computing, backup became something that enterprises could now pay another organisation to provide the service and take over the responsibility of managing the backups as a service. Cloud Backup Services was born, and along with it, the ability to backup to, and restore from another organisation’s data centre.
Today, cloud-based backup services are widely used, allowing customers to store and access their data from anywhere with an internet connection.
And with the advancement in technology around how backups were completed, and the type of media used in the process, Enterprises began taking data protection much more seriously and became mandatory for the most part when laws were introduced around data compliance and sovereignty.
Why do Enterprises still back up? And what has changed?
Whether it is 60 years ago or today, the fundamental requirement remains the same Enterprise backup solutions are designed to provide businesses with a secure and reliable way to store and protect their data. These solutions typically offer a variety of features, such as the ability to back up data from multiple devices and locations, versioning to allow users to roll back to previous versions of their data, and the ability to encrypt data both in transit and at rest to protect it from unauthorised access.
It is important to note that with enterprise cloud backup services, a company is entrusting a third-party software with their sensitive data and sometimes (in managed services situations) – the management of their data as well, so it is crucial to do thorough research and due diligence to ensure that the provider is reliable, trustworthy, and the data is secure.
Equally important to remember is that enterprise cloud backup services are often provided by third-party companies, which may offer different levels of service depending on the needs of the business. For example, some services may be designed for small businesses and costed appropriately, while others may be designed for large enterprise organizations which may have more aggressive SLAs which usually attract a higher cost to achieve.
One of these requirements is the need for off-site data storage to store secondary copies, which can be beneficial in a natural disaster or other events affecting the company’s on-premises data centre.
And whether it is managed backup service, what is just as important is investing in a reliable, and solid data protection software solution.
As more and more enterprises virtualised their physical servers, the need to still safeguard these virtual workloads still needed to be protected by software that understood the differences in virtual machines.
Enter BDRSuite for Enterprise Data protection.
BDRSuite is a backup and disaster recovery solution for businesses that provides data protection, backup, and recovery capabilities for various systems and applications.
It helps organisations protect against data loss, minimise downtime, and ensure business continuity in the event of data loss or a disaster. It supports various platforms including Windows Server, Linux, and of course VMware environments, and offers features such as continuous data protection, disaster recovery, and easy-to-use backup management. Another great consideration is that as it supports all of these environments, it does not require multiple management interfaces to sign into in order to provide visibility across all of them, having a complete view and the ability to report on your entire data protection is a massive asset and will improve your overall RTO.
One of the core concepts of BDRSuite is that it provides image-based backups, which allow for the creation of a complete replica of a system, including the operating system, applications, and its data. It also supports incremental backups, which only back up changes made since the last backup and can be scheduled to run automatically at specific intervals making data protection mostly automated.
This is a giant leap from manually duplicating a magnetic tape onto another. It essentially enables the ability for multiple recovery options, including bare-metal recovery, which allows for the complete restoration of a system, and file-level recovery, which allows for the granular restoration of specific files or folders.
So, let’s look specifically at what the offering is in the VMware world. Just how does BDRSuite protect VMware workloads for the enterprise?
What is BDRSuite for VMware
BDRSuite for VMware backs up the virtual machines by leveraging VMware’s virtualization technology to capture a consistent snapshot of the virtual machines and their data. The backup process typically involves quiescing the virtual machine’s file system, creating a snapshot of the virtual machine’s virtual disk, and then transferring the snapshot to a backup repository.
This allows BDRSuite to provide point-in-time backup and recovery of virtual machines, even when they are running. Once the virtual machine snapshots have been captured, BDRSuite can perform various data protection (and storage savings) operations, such as data deduplication, compression, encryption, and replication, to optimize the backup data and ensure data protection. And one of the best things of all, it does all of this without having to deploy a backup agent!
Additionally, it provides the ability to back up and restore data to and from different locations, including local storage, remote storage, and cloud storage.
Protecting your VMware workloads with BDRSuite
If we think back to the magnetic tape era (and even the floppy disk era), there was only one type of backup, and one type of restore you could do – full stop.
But in the modern today, there is a range of backup types and enhancements (due to the smarts in the backup form factor) available for VMware workloads that BDRSuite can offer.
Image-based backups: BDRSuite supports image-based backups of virtual machines running on VMware, allowing for the creation of a complete replica of the system, including the operating system, applications, and data. This can be used for disaster recovery scenarios, as well as for migrating virtual machines to different environments.
Incremental backups: BDRSuite supports incremental backups, which can be used to back up changes made to virtual machines since the last backup. This can help reduce the amount of storage space required for backups and can also speed up the backup process.
Granular recovery: BDRSuite allows for the recovery of individual files or folders within a virtual machine, rather than having to restore the entire virtual machine. This can be useful in scenarios where only a small amount of data needs to be recovered.
Other hypervisors support: BDRSuite can protect and recover data from multiple virtualisation platforms, including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and KVM. This allows for a single solution to be used for data protection across different virtualisation environments.
Cloud Backup: BDRSuite also offers the ability to back up and restore data to and from cloud storage, such as Azure Cloud or Amazon S3 bucket. This allows for offsite data storage and can be useful in a natural disaster or other events affecting the company’s on-premises data centre.
This is also handy as it aligns with best practices notably the 3-2-1 backup rule. 3 copies of your data on two different media (disk and tape) with one copy off-site for disaster recovery.
By providing these features, BDRSuite can help ensure the availability and recoverability of critical data in a VMware environment and provide faster RTOs, and smaller RPO for the enterprise customer.
In closing, BDRSuite offers a range of smart backup and restore options for VMware workloads, it is important to note that while VMware remains a big presence in many different enterprise environments, these customers also run other types of workloads and operating systems that also need to be backed up.
Having one multi-platform data protection solution with a cloud backup capability to sit across these modern-day VMware environments is crucial for visibility, recoverability and even compliance, luckily BDRSuite has you covered.
For more information on BDRSuite for VMware, please visit https://www.bdrsuite.com/vmware-backup/
