Comprehensive VMware Virtual
Machine Protection with Asigra
Most enterprise IT environments are more than 50 percent virtualized and organizations are looking to increase their virtualization footprint further . You need to make sure that these virtual machines storing essential data and mission-critical applications are safeguarded in the event of data loss so you can ensure business continuity if servers fail or your entire data center goes down. Even if only a small percentage of your environment is virtualized, you can’t afford not to protect data residing on virtual machines.
Some enterprises look at virtual machine protection as being independent of all of their other data protection activities, and it can lead you to adopt point solutions for backing up virtual machines. Unfortunately, these point solutions don’t provide complete protection – they may only backup local machine or only provide protection for virtual machines. Asigra Cloud Backup™ is a comprehensive enterprise-class backup, recovery and restore platform designed to integrate virtual machine protection into your enterprise-wide data protection activities. With the Asigra platform, you can ensure your virtual machines are protected and available at all times; it provides peace of mind that you can continue your business operations in the event that either a server or the entire site goes down. In addition, the complimentary virtual machine protection integrated into our end-to-end backup and recovery suite can help you save money by reducing license costs and improving operational efficiencies.
VMware Backup Needs of Organizations
As virtualization technology has matured, and enterprises have been running a number of critical applications on VMware, a great deal of corporate data now resides on virtual machines. If any of these virtual machines were to go down or become unavailable, you would be faced with a significant interruption in business operations because you couldn’t access mission-critical business data. To address these challenges, you’ve likely been seeking a solution that can protect your VMware environment against both server failures and complete site failures.
The use of multiple solutions – one for virtual machine backups and others for file backups -- has led to a division of responsibility for data protection: The VMware administrator is typically responsible for the backup and recovery of virtual machines, rather than the backup administrator, who is responsible for backing up all of the other machines in the organization. This separation of responsibilities has also led to the same data being backed up multiple times.
In addition, using multiple solutions has increased your licensing, training and management costs. These point solutions for virtual machine protection often don’t comprehensively safeguard against local failures or site failures.
Ideally, you want a backup and recovery solution that allows you to have backup copies of your virtual machines available to you that can be turned on instantly when faced with the failure of either a single machine or an entire site. These copies should be available locally for machine failures, as well as remotely if an entire site goes down.
You also want a data protection solution for virtual machines that automates the process of managing backups. You also want to be able to create policies for backing up multiple sets of virtual machines simultaneously rather than having to create copies of machines individually. Most importantly, you want assurance that your virtual machines can be recovered from backup copies at all times.
The Asigra Solution
In order to provide an end-to-end solution for your entire enterprise backup and recovery needs, Asigra Cloud Backup provides a comprehensive stack of VMware protection capabilities. We believe that virtualization is a given in today’s data center, so we do not treat virtual machine protection any different from any other data protection capability in our platform. VMware data protection capabilities are included at no additional cost with our end-to-end enterprise backup, recovery, and restore software.
Our VMware data protection solutions offer you a host of options to ensure your virtual machines are always available to you when you need them.
Low impact virtual machine backups
Asigra Cloud Backup leverages the native VMware APIs for Data Protection (VADP) with Change Block Tracking (CBT). This improves the efficiency of data backups because only the changes to the virtual machines are sent to the backup repository. By following the VMware-recommended API method to backup virtual machines, Asigra Cloud Backup ensures virtual machines are quiesced and backed up incrementally using low impact methods. Organizations can also schedule backups of virtual machines at regular intervals. Asigra Cloud Backup automatically backs up new virtual machines that are created in the environment and also performs backups of virtual machines that are turned off.
Recover instantly from server failures with Local DS-VDR
Asigra Cloud Backup features Local DS-VDR to help you recover instantly from local server failures. This feature allows you to create a backup copy of one or more physical or virtual machine within the local environment. When the original machine goes down, organizations can continue to operate by just turning on the virtual copy of the machine. This functionality helps organizations gain access to their data and applications within minutes, guaranteeing continued business operations as usual even as you work on recovering the primary infrastructure.
Continue business operations at a remote site with Remote DS-VDR
With Remote DS-VDR organizations can create a hot spare of their VMware virtual machines at a remote offsite data center, providing a failover option in the event their entire site goes down. Organizations can configure the backup of the primary site at regular intervals, as well as configure the software to perform a refresh of the warm spare at the end of every backup activity. In the event of a site failure, organizations can continue to access their data and run applications from this remote data center even as they work on recovering the machine at the primary location.
The Asigra Advantage
Asigra Cloud Backup includes a broad array of features to support the backup and recovery of virtual machines, as well as all on-premise data residing within your organization:
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It does not require software agents within the virtual machine for backup or recovery, ensuring efficient backups that do not consume additional server resources.•
Asigra’s incremental forever technology performs deduplication and compression of the data before it is transmitted to the remote offsite data center, preventing network degradation when backup jobs run. It also performs global deduplication of data to optimize the use of storage resources.•
Automation features help backup administrators configure, manage and schedule backup activities, as well as set up retention policies and dictate the number of generations of the data that they would like to protect in their offline repositories.•
NIST FIPS 140-2 certified encryption ensures that all data sent outside the local data center is secure and encrypted.•
Multiple recovery and restore assurance capabilities protect against the corruption of data in the backup repositories and ensure data is always recoverable.•
Because Asigra protects virtual machines in the form of virtual disk images, recovering a virtual machine is as simple as turning on the backed up copy of the virtual machine.•
Asigra provides enterprise-class scalability to ensure that organizations can backup every virtual machine in their environment using a single platform; you can backup hundreds to thousands of virtual machines.Comprehensive data protection
About Asigra
Asigra is the leading cloud computing software vendor focused on backup, recovery and restoration with more than 550,000 global installations. Asigra Cloud Backup™ transforms the way businesses manage and protect their data by delivering seamless end-to-end data protection that efficiently scales and easily adapts to any IT environment. With more than 26 years of experience as backup/recovery pioneers, Asigra manages one of the largest business-class backup service provider ecosystems in the world who power their cloud backup services using Asigra technology and provide hands-on local service. Asigra Cloud Backup was recently awarded the 2012 Frost & Sullivan North American New Product Innovation Award in Cloud Based Data Management and was named “Product of the Year” by Storage Magazine. Asigra was recently awarded a 5-Star rating in the CRN Magazine’s 2012 Partner Program Guide, named a CRN 2012 Channel Chief, and also named a Best Channel Partner for 2012 by Business Solutions Magazine. Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices globally. For more information, visit www.asigra.com
