While many organizations traditionally discourage the use of Apple^® products due to perceptions of higher costs and incompatibilities with the Windows architecture, many feel the tide has turned. In fact, according to Forrester, almost 50% of North American and Western European businesses now issue Macs to their employees.

One of the key drivers of this trend is the consumerization of IT, something Apple’s largely been credited with starting. One doesn’t need to go further than your own office to see this trend in action. Walk down a hallway or visit the lunchroom, and you’ll see people using their own iPhones^® and iPads^® to do work. The question you need to ask is – how ready is your business for this consumerization trend?

Does your organization put more energy into the type of technology people use, or on what people do with the technology?

If you’re investing the time and infrastructure in BYOD, then you need to consider supporting Macs to increase employee productivity and satisfaction. However, while consideration is important, the reality is not every company is ready, willing nor able to use Apple technologies.

To make it easier for you to determine if your organization is ready for Apple technologies like Macs, iPads and iPhones, we’ve put together this handy infographic for you to use.

Download a handy PDF version of the infographic by clicking the infographic below!

Ever since mobile devices with front-facing cameras hit the mainstream, the way we communicate with each other has been moving from sci-fi to reality. Slick-looking devices like the iPhone and iPad now bring people face-to-face over great distances – just like we’ve seen in the movies.

While FaceTime and other chat apps may be great for the average consumer, we still need a viable solution for organizations looking for the same futuristic forms of collaboration.

When combined with Cisco’s Unified Communication applications like Jabber, Webex, and Webex Social, Apple makes the future of enterprise collaboration a reality – with tools your users will actually want to use.

Consider this future of collaboration:

• Seamless Integration: Apps for Jabber, WebEx and WebEx Social are at their best on both the iOS and Mac OS X platform. Joining WebEx while mobile gets easier when your users can tap the screen once to see the presentation, and just one more tap to join the conference call.
• Switch between devices: Send Jabber chats and WebEx sessions from your Mac to your iPhone to your iPad, without losing the connection or making the other particpants rejoin.
• Escalate Interactions: Promote a chat to a video conference to a WebEx on the fly, without jumping through hoops.
• Leverage the Power of Social: WebEx Social brings employees closer together with “Facebook-ization” of the Enterprise. Exchange ideas, locate resources with ease and plug in to your company’s talent like never before, all with state-of-the-art Apps on Mac OS X and iOS
• Preferred means of contact: Let your users decide and express the best way to reach them – via iPhone, Email or Jabber chat on your Mac or iPad.

Consult, Implement and Manage
To prepare you and your workforce for this amazing technology, Softchoice works closely with you and determine the best way for you to leverage Apple and Cisco solutions.

• Deploy your iPads and Macs with Softchoice: Leverage Softchoice Technology Deployment Services to deliver ready-to-use iPads and MacBooks directly to your end users hands. No more scrambling to install the settings and policies on each and every device, let Softchoice’s skilled deployment bench provide the full solution so your users can hit the ground running, with Jabber and WebEx pre-installed.
• Manage your AppleCare and Cisco Smartnet with Softchoice. Our TechCheck Services determine when your AppleCare and Cisco SmartNet are due to expire and help you take the appropriate actions to ensure ongoing enterprise level support.

Reach out to your Softchoice Account Manager for more info, or better yet, leave a comment below with your questions about Apple and Cisco working together and I’ll respond as quickly as I can.

IT’s battle against inefficiency has been raging for years. Two thirds of companies go over schedule on their project/solution deployments. Technology complexity doubles every two years. And more than 70% of budgets are spent on operations and maintenance, a percentage which is growing. Blade servers were introduced as a solution to such problems. And while they did make headway, their basic architecture failed to resolve key underlining issues.

In the first article of this 2-part series, we examined the findings of IT analyst Clabby Analytics’ 8-page white paper A Comparison of IBM’s New Flex System Environment to Traditional Blade Architectures to address the most frequently asked questions we hear from customers. In this second entry of a 2-part series, we’ll look at some of the shortcomings of traditional blades, and why Clabby Analytics believes IBM Flex System is the best blade offering in the market.

The Shortcomings of Traditional Blades
The Clabby Analytics report details the shortcomings of traditional blades. In particular, they cite four areas of concern:

• Chassis: Existing blade chassis were designed with yesterday’s speeds in mind. As a result, they limit bandwidth to 40 Gb or below, and in some cases do not support increasingly popular connectivity methodologies such as InfiniBand. In time, they will hit the wall and new chassis will have to be purchased.
• Latency: Traffic within the blades is routed in an indirect manner and this adds unnecessary latency. For those requiring high performance, internal blade latency is a growing concern.
• Storage: Blades originated as a way to increase compute density by packing more memory and processing power into a smaller space. This was accomplished at the expense of storage which was shipped externally to the SAN. That approach was adequate five years ago, but the rise of Big Data demands storage close to the CPU.
• Management: Blade management systems focus on the physical blade environment but are limited when it comes to monitoring virtual machines, networking and storage subsystems.

“To manage blade environment most efficiently, systems administrators and managers need well-integrated tools that can manage both physical and virtual resources across the entire systems environment (compute nodes, storage and networks) in a cohesive, integrated manner,” said the Clabby report. “All major blade vendors will need to rebuilt their blade chassis environments in order to support high speed 100Gb Ethernet and faster connections in the future.”

How Flex System Address these issues
Latency is reduced by up to 50 percent in IBM Flex System due to a more direct design that facilitates rapid internal communication. Up to eight Solid State Drives (SSDs) can be placed inside the chassis which equates to 1.6 TB of superfast flash storage.

The chassis itself has advantages in terms of airflow, power consumption, and cooling and can accommodate advanced communications adapters such as the latest generations of InfiniBand, and 100Gb Ethernet. The Flex System chassis contains 14 half-wide bays whereas most competitors contain 8. It can also utilize 224 CPU cores per chassis whereas other competing chassis’ offer 128 CPU cores.

Finally, Flex System Manager (FSM) is a single pane of glass across the entire ecosystem. As well as all compute, networking and storage assets, FSM has the capability to manage all virtualization environments and related storage from one interface.

“All major system components as well as ancillary components will all be connected in a unified, converged system architecture that can be managed from a common management point,” said Clabby Analytics. “In the FSM world, systems managers have control over all of the resources needed to ensure that applications can run optimally.”

How IBM Flex System compares against HP BladeCenter and Cisco UCS
The report directly contrasts Flex System against the leading blade servers on the market, including IBM BladeCenter. Compared to the HP BladeSystem BL 460c Gen8, for example, Flex System offers 50% more memory for virtualization and twice the networking bandwidth.

While the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) simplified the deployment process of blades and associated virtual machines, Clabby found it to be too narrow in its application. The architecture makes it easy to install compute nodes, but is not well integrated with the rest of IT.

“The problem with this design is that the burden of integrating traditional blades with storage and switch components falls squarely on the shoulders of IT managers and administrators or onto systems integrators,” said Clabby Analytics. “These managers/integrators may or may not have deep tuning/optimization expertise. In contrast, IBM Flex System deliberately builds on what it has learned after years of infrastructure deployment to provide solutions that, in the majority of cases, outperform the self-integrated designs of most IT managers/integrators.”

Get the IBM Flex System Enterprise Chassis from Softchoice. It comes rack mountable with room for up to 14 blades. For more detailed information on IBM Flex System, take IBM’s virtual tour.

Related links: IBM PureFlex is fast: Get revved up over speedy new way to upgrade [IBM]

Companies who jump into implementing a collaboration solution get so bogged down with project specs, purchasing and implementation concerns that they forget the most important factor: end-user adoption.

Hans Hwang, VP of Advanced Services at Cisco says “…the high cost of low adoption really kicks [in] when under-adoption stops collaboration-enabled strategic initiatives in their tracks.” Basically, when you invest in a large collaboration implementation and users are slow to adopt the new capabilities, that ROI meeting may turn into an awkward conversation. How do you ensure your users will adopt the new tools, taking your collaboration project from awkward ROI meeting to celebrating success?

In this Softchoice Quickguide on Cisco’s Unified Communications and Collaboration offering, we offer 6 key steps to build your collaboration roadmap – all with the end-user in mind. We cover key findings from our own customers’ implementations, how to leverage Softchoice’s own collaboration experience, and showcase our strategic partnership with Cisco as one of a few UC Master and Gold partners in North America.

What you’ll find in this Softchoice QuickGuide:

• How to understand your users
• Evaluate your environment using our framework
• Review collaboration platforms
• Implementation and management
• Tying it back to user adoption

> Download Quickguide

In December 2012, Adobe introduced Creative Cloud for Teams – its first foray into cloud-based subscription to license its creative suite of products.

This week Adobe announced it’s done with boxed software and is betting big on SaaS – and a future entirely in the cloud. Moving forward, Creative Suite and Creative Cloud for Teams will be known simply as Creative Cloud.

If you’ve invested in any previous version of Creative Suite, you’ll need to understand how Adobe’s Creative Cloud model affects licensing and support moving forward.

While it’s early days and we’re still gathering the facts and reactions (check back here regularly for updates), here are the top 5 points our team has already identified that will impact on your organization.

1. This is the new normal for software distribution from Adobe

Adobe clearly made a calculation – and it’s probably right about it over the long term – that the days of distributing software via boxed software, continual upgrades and perpetual plans are done. Adobe said it was surprised by how popular Creative Cloud Team has been over the last year and decided to make a bold move in that direction rather than continue offering both traditional licensing and cloud versions of its applications.

Moving forward, the only way to buy Adobe software will be through Creative Cloud. That said, Adobe has decided that Acrobat, Lightroom and Elements will continue to be offered as stand-alone versions.

According to Adobe, single product subscriptions will also be available via Creative Cloud later this year. This is good news for organizations that only need one or two applications, and don’t need the full suite of Creative Cloud.

Having said that, if you end up needing three or more applications, it will be economically advantageous to license the whole Creative Cloud – and gain access to the other products in the suite.

And for those wondering – Creative Cloud apps will continue to be installed and run locally on your Mac & PC. While there are features that leverage the cloud in new ways (we talk about later in the post), this remarkable shift to SaaS is more about sourcing and licensing than anything else. In other words, you don’t have to worry about trying to work with 4Gb PSD files in the cloud.

2. The economics of Creative Cloud should work to your advantage

We’ve spoken at length here about the pros and cons of subscriptions. While some see this as a way for companies to squeeze customers, many see it as a smart move and, frankly, a downright bargain.

For instance, a year’s list price subscription of Creative Cloud’s team product is about $840 per user – $480 for the first year for old Creative Suite 3 and up users – and gives customers access to the entire suite of continuously updated apps.

The most apples-to-apples comparison would be between clients who’ve purchased Creative Suite Master Collection with active maintenance and renewed annually. For example, check out this chart:

From an IT perspective, procurement and accounting points of view, monthly subscriptions are a no-brainer – they make things a lot easier, more efficient and cheaper.

3. Subscriptions mean 100% compliance – and less risk

This isn’t just about renting software. With Adobe moving to a 100% subscription model for Creative Cloud, the implications for your software license management is significant. With Creative Cloud subscriptions, you also reduce the risk of software piracy within your organization.

4. Collaboration in the cloud will change how your team works

Clearly, cloud integration will be enhanced between all Adobe’s Creative Cloud applications, allowing designers to explore, create, publish and share work more easily than ever before. A cloud-based clipboard will make doing work on any device seamless, moving assets from one device to another with ease.

Collaboration also gets a boost thanks to Adobe’s integration of Behance, a site that allows creatives to show off their work and solicit feedback. Adobe acknowledges that this (and some other public cloud features) won’t be appropriate or allowed for government, education and other customers, so it’s creating SKUs and versions of Creative Cloud to meet their specific needs.

For a complete overview of all the team features of Creative Cloud, check out this PDF from Adobe.

5. Support for CS6 will continue – for a time

Adobe will continue to sell CS6 and offer security updates and patches for now but for how much longer is not clear. Moving forward, Adobe has indicated it will not update Creative Suite applications with any net-new features.

Our team is working directly with our counterparts at Adobe to understand the broader implications of this announcement to our clients. As we learn new things, we’ll update this post. In the meantime, please leave your comments, critical questions and concerns below and we’ll address them as quickly as possible. You can also learn more about Creative Cloud at SoftchoiceCloud.com.

Since HP won the $2.3B battle over 3PAR, they have brought the enterprise-class features of 3PAR storage into a mid-range solution offering. This pre-configured, converged storage platform combines HP 3PAR software with HP EVA storage arrays and HP BladeSystem ProLiant server hardware.

SearchStorage.com recently published their 2013 purchasing intentions survey, and concluded that:

• The largest chunk of IT budget goes to storage systems
• 60% of companies say they are using more storage because of virtualization
• 25% say cloud storage services will play a major role in their future strategy

Because the largest chunk of an IT budget is spent on storage, I asked Softchoice Solutions Architect Adam Wolfson to give us his opinion on why HP 3PAR storage may be right for you.

Solving for capacity pains

Without shared, networked storage there is no virtualization with scale. HP is using 3PAR SAN technology to deliver efficiency and agility to virtual, cloud and IT-as-a-service environments. They claim their thin technology can reduce disks by 50-75%, admin time by 90% and the costs of a system refresh by 60%. When a solution architect tells you they can reduce your storage purchase needs by 75% with this solution, it means less equipment to house, fewer disks to power and cool, less hardware to maintain and an overall reduction of your company’s carbon footprint.

Wolfson likes that the efficiency, performance and resiliency of a Tier 1 enterprise storage system is now available at a mid-range price point and says,

“The idea here is that 3PAR plays in the high-end space and HP brought their solution down-market with their arrays; into the $30-40k price range.   HP 3PAR should be grouped with the likes of EMC’s vMac and Hitatchi’s VSP – the highest end enterprise class arrays.”

Is it really the most efficient storage array like HP claims? Wolfson explains,

“With this solution you will need half as many hosts for the number of VMs. Having twice as many virtual machines on each host effectively doubles your virtual machine density. Keep in mind this is geared towards Tier1 and mission-critical workloads.”

Is 3PAR right for your environment?

Customers who have the following should consider 3PAR:

• A heavily virtualized environment with a 150-200+ seat count
• Managing 10TB of data or more, like finance, media or engineering companies
• Companies with a large number of applications – this solution is good at supporting a large set of applications that you might need a bunch of storage arrays for or intelligence to support.
• Companies looking to support Tier 1 and mission critical workloads with a mid-range price point.

If you want to dig deeper into 3PAR architecture, download the HP 3PAR Architecture white paper (pdf), or view the HP 3PAR Utility Storage – Storage without boundaries for Cloud video on YouTube.

If you want to dive deeper into HP’s 3PAR software offerings, download HP’s 3PAR Tier 1 storage for virtualization and the cloud brochure (pdf).

Where you should start

This conversation really begins with budget. Write down your hard costs (purchase price, maintenance and service, people, space and power) and soft costs (improved productivity, employee retention, footprint reductions etc.) to compare them to your TCO (don’t forget to add CAPEX and OPEX expenses for the life of the product). With those numbers in hand, you will see the quantifiable benefits of this solution.

What you should do next

Softchoice offers a Storage Assessment and a Workload Optimization Assessment.

You will work with a Softchoice storage expert to refine the scope of your project and help you correctly identify business issues. Then, a Softchoice solutions architect can build the right configuration and even assist  you in building a business case to secure executive approvals! Contact your Softchoice rep or email us and we can help you get started.

Unless your infrastructure is already standardized on IBM, choosing a solution like IBM Pure Systems may seem like a daunting, expensive rip-and-replace decisions. In a recent 8 page white paper, A Comparison of IBM’s New Flex System Environment to Traditional Blade Architectures, IT analyst firm Clabby Analytics compares IBM’s Flex System to its biggest rival – blade architecture.

In this post, the first in a 2-part series, we’ll examine their findings, introduce you to Flex System and answer the most frequently asked questions we hear from customers.

An introduction to Flex System
Flex System is a solution that provides users with the leeway to utilize non-IBM components when building their unique environments. Instead of having to cobble together a long list of servers, blades, storage arrays, network switches and adapters, Flex System delivers this via an all-in-one, pre-integrated chassis.

“Flex Systems are comprised of components that make up a whole system environment: compute nodes, storage nodes, network switches and PCIe expansion cards,” said Clabby Analytics.

What comes with Flex System?
Flex System compute nodes are available in standard rack and full-width form factors that are jam-packed with compute power:

• The latest Intel Xeon x86 based processors (4-socket Xeon E5 multi-core processors)
• 48 memory slots which can host up to 1.5 TB of memory
• Two hot swappable 2.5 inch Solid State Drives (SSDs) or Hard Disk Drives (HDDs)
• A LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM)

All of this is compressed into a chassis that takes up 10 Rack Units (RU) in a standard data center rack.

At first look, this may sound similar to existing blade server architectures. However, there are several distinct differences. According to the Clabby Analytics report:

“Flex System offers superior manageability, faster communications, more storage capacity (using up to eight internal SSDs per compute node) and better storage management – as well as broader/better physical/virtual system management – than all of today’s leading blade competitors.”

What management is like with Flex System
One of the benefits of Flex System is that it reduces management costs. Instead of relying on multiple applications from a variety of vendors, IBM’s cross-system management tool known as Flex System Manager (FSM) has the ability to manage across your entire environment from one screen. This means you manage all storage, networking, blade and communication components from one device.

These management capabilities even extend beyond Flex System itself and into other related equipment in the server room or data center. In the world of virtualization, Flex System is equipped with a dual enabled hypervisor as well as a VMware ESXi on flash key option. IBM’s VMControl module, for instance, can operate all major virtualization platforms from one interface.

Flex System Manager uses a ‘single-pane-of-glass’ management interface to manage across compute storage and networking resources. The ability to manage across an entire systems environment results in greater manager/administrator productivity — helping to significantly lower operational costs related to systems/storage/network management,” said Clabby Analytics.

How fast is it?
According to Clabby Analytics, one of the biggest differentiators of Flex System can be found in its network switching capabilities. Instead of a sending all traffic from the various compute nodes to the top of the rack and back which adds processing overhead and adds latency, Flex System’s internal switches cut latency in half. For organizations demanding high performance, this is a welcome advance.

The chassis holds up to 14 half-width compute nodes linked together with high-performance networking in the form of 10 Gb Ethernet switches with 40Gb uplinks, 16Gb Fibre Channel and the latest in InfiniBand connectivity.

How much storage capacity does it have?
When blade servers burst onto the scene a few years back, one of their major selling points was having little or no storage capacity on blade. This enabled designers to pack more processors and more memory into a smaller space. Unfortunately, the demands of a Big Data world mean that storage can no longer only be left to external storage arrays.

Accordingly, Flex System delivers up to eight internal SSDs per compute node for super-fast data access and up to 1.6 TB per node. Reliability features such as flash copy and thin provisioning have also been added. In the very near future, IBM will introduce a Storwise V7000-like storage node that can slot into the Flex System chassis if even more internal storage is desired.

“The first benefit of putting this large storage array within a Flex System rack is that compute nodes will need to take fewer hops to get to data. The second benefit is that the Storwize V7000 will be easier to manage,” said Clabby Analytics.

FSM simplifies how IT deals with pooling and virtualization of external storage, defining and attaching disks to virtual machines. Dynamic provisioning, storage tiering, and other advanced storage management functions can also be accomplished. For example, an IT manager working within FSM is able to launch IBM San Volume Controller to virtualize and manage all existing storage – regardless of vendor.

Do you think it’s too bleeding edge?
IBM designed the Flex System chassis to handle compute, storage, and networking requirements for the next decade. While individual components will be updated regularly, the chassis itself will not change. This protects the investment while enabling internal upgrades to be made at the owner’s discretion.

In the second blog post in this series, we’ll go into a detailed comparison of Flex System against the various blade server architectures currently on the market.

IBM’s Top Gun Frank Morassutti recently visited Softchoice, and we had a chance to sit down with him and discuss the data center trends, server commoditization, server virtualization and how IBM’s System X solution fits into the picture.

In part 1 of this series, Frank discusses:

• Server commoditization and the ‘vendor price war’
• How IBM technology offers a unique value over competitors
• The prevalence of server virtualization and it’s spread into the data center

In part 2 of this series, Frank discusses:

• The top 3 data center trends that support virtualization
• The 3 key pillars of a converged infrastructure like PureSystems
• How PureSystems is much more than just Blades

In part 3 of this series, Frank discusses:

• The bigger, better, faster Cloud
• Third party IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services
• IBM’s response to the demand for Cloud services

So you’ve decided to virtualize your storage. Virtualization often means dealing with complex shared storage for the first time. For example, a SAN configuration may require an FC Switch, a Server HBA, FC cables, and an external RAID storage hardware. Its complex, it takes up space, and it isn’t very efficient.

What if there was another option available? One that allowed to you create a software-based shared storage solution that acted like a SAN and not like a traditional Virtual SAN Appliance?

This solution is closer to reality than you may think.

At VMware Partner Exchange, VMware unveiled their forward-looking solution called VSA to solve the problem of costly, complex storage solutions. Other industry terms for this are distributed storage, unified storage, and software-defined storage.

What is a VSA?
In the future, with a VSA (Virtual SAN Appliance), you will take the local hard drive on the server (often a cluster of 3) and the VSA copies information across servers. Then, software pools all of those hard drives together to act as a single storage array. This isn’t magic, it’s software-defined storage, and it’s made up of 3 main components:

1. Storage Policy based Management
2. Virtual volumes, virtual flash and virtual data services to enhance traditional storage
3. Distributed storage to enable scale out Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) for vSphere

Bewitched? If you want to learn more about the concept behind a Software-Defined Data Center, check out our previous post The Software-Defined-Data-Center (SDDC): Concept or Reality?

Who is it for?
VMware says that “VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) transforms the local storage within your servers into a shared storage resource that runs your virtualized applications.” Accordingly, I feel a company with the following profile is ideally suited for this solution:

• Many locations with a small IT staff
• An SMB starting to virtualize
• Plans for expansion i.e. building a new location and want to manage the location remotely

It’s good to know this solution is aligned with T10 industry standardization. This is important because almost all modern IO interfaces use the iSCSI architecture. Although it sounds like an enterprise solution, I think it has an immediate payout to the SMB space by reducing initial costs for hardware to support an intelligent storage environment. This is a great alternative if you can’t afford a Storage Array Network or if you want to start virtualizing and don’t have the budget.

How does it work?
Building out a separate network for storage can be complex and expensive. If you do not have the right skills available in house, you will need to engage external professional services. In addition, managing a SAN requires specific knowledge to operate and keep optimized. The cost and complexity may outweigh the benefits.

With the VSA or software-defined storage, local storage on your servers is shared across all servers. Then, software intelligently places storage information on those hard drives by tiering your storage on the SSDs and HDDs. It’s tightly integrated with other vSphere functions. IO boot is directly tied in, and it runs on every single host in the cluster. Again, it uses local attached disks and SSDs on hosts.

In short, it provides a converged platform for storage and compute on the same server. This minimizes the use of memory and CPU for storage overhead.

Primary Use Cases:

1. VDI – built in caching to deliver high performance and avoid boot storms
2. Tier 2 or 3 workloads and testing or dev environments that demand fast provisioning at low cost
3. Big Data environments that need scalability and high bandwidth
4. Disaster Recovery where you want reduced hardware at a remote site

All it takes is turning on VSAN and adding it to the cluster, and the technology does the rest. For example, you provision a new VM, that requires ‘X’ capacity, ‘X’ amount of IOPs, and specify the kind of RTO/RPO. Essentially you can take policies and translate it down to a storage policy area.

Is software-defined storage the best path for all storage in the future?
It does seem like this concept reduces costs and simplifies management. This means better ROI when your storage is better utilized locally. However, remember that your storage solution needs to serve your business first, and not the latest industry trends. For example, you can set up tiered storage in your SAN to manage storage drives. With a VSA software tiers it for you on those local drives in the server. So you can compare solutions all day, in the end you need to choose what fits your IT environment and your budget.

Can I buy the VSA today?
It is not available today, but VMware has provided key partners like Softchoice a tech preview of the technology. I am looking forward to see how the final product operates and the use cases that it will address.  My advice is that, depending on your organization and what you need, this may be a good option in the future when it becomes available.

Is this something you would adopt? What questions do you have? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll respond as soon as I can.

The new VMware vSphere Data Protection solution, or VDP, is a VMware vSphere backup and recovery application. VDP is new vSphere 5.1 and is completely free with all editions of vSphere 5.1, starting with vSphere Essentials Plus. VDP replaces VMware’s previous backup and recovery solution – VMware Data Recovery (or VDR). Thankfully, VDP has so much more to offer us than VDR ever did.

Why Do You Need A Virtualization Backup Solution?
Before we discuss VDP in detail, let’s take a step back and ask: Why do you need a virtualization backup solution in the first place?

Most companies considering VDP are relatively new to VMware vSphere and virtualization. Also, most companies have a physical server backup solution in their datacenter already. The problem with traditional physical server backup applications is that they backup the virtual machines at the file level, with agents deployed in every virtual machine. This is inefficient and causes backups and recoveries to take much longer than they need to. Traditional agent-based backup also can cause performance issues because of the large amount of data that must be transferred during the growing backup window.

With virtualization aware, agentless backup products like vSphere Data Protection, no agents have to be installed and only the changed blocks of the virtual machine disk files are backed up. Because snapshot technology is used, backups can be done anytime (even during the day) with no need for a “backup window”.  Thus, if you are using traditional backup applications in your virtual infrastructure but you have vSphere Essentials Plus, or better, you should consider using VDP.

vSphere Data Protection – The Basics
VDP is based on technology that VMware gained from EMC and has a vastly improved user interface over VDR. I like the new usability of VDP but the most important features are:

• Virtual appliance deployment – There is no Windows OS to buy, no Windows OS to install/configure/patch/secure, and you can be up and running fast.
• Integrates with the vSphere Web Client – You can backup and recover virtual machines from the same client you already use to administer vSphere.
• Utilization of change block tracking (CBT) – utilizing the vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP), VDP can backup just the changed blocks of virtual machine disk files
• Variable-length deduplication – VMware claims that by using the EMC Avamar technology in VDP, they can deduplicate up to 99% of file system backup data.
• Change block tracking (CBT) restore – with CBT, VDP can restore just the changed blocks of a virtual machine to make restore faster than ever
• File level recovery (FLR) – with FLR you can restore individual files if you don’t want to restore the virtual machine back to its last backup state

VDP – Things to Look Out For
As with many “included” / free products, there are sometimes things that you need to know (look out for) that may prevent issues later in the future. VDP has a few things that you need to know about. They are:

• VDP can only backup up to 100 virtual machines and can only store up to 2TB of backup data. Because of this, VDP is only for small virtual infrastructures that don’t plan to scale larger than 100 virtual machines (or 2TB).
• Each vCenter server can have up to 10 VDP virtual management machines running, giving you a total of up to 1000 virtual machines that can be backed up (but the jobs would have to be administered from those 10 different VDP management appliances).
• You can only store VDP backup data on the VMFS virtual disk that is attached to the VDP appliance. Because this is how it works, it’s difficult to get the backup data offsite, onto tape.
• It can’t backup physical servers
• You must be using vCenter 5.1 and the vSphere Web Client version 5.1

Even with these limitations, if you are already building a virtual infrastructure (or already have) vSphere Essentials Plus or better, then VDP is a great solution at a very reasonable (free) price!

VDP Summary
VMware Data Protection is an excellent data protection solution for small and medium sized business who don’t anticipate that the numbers of VMs in their infrastructure will expand beyond 100. The new interface is well designed and a great improvement over VDR.

Are you a licensed user of vSphere Essentials Plus or better (or plan to be soon) and don’t have a virtualization-aware backup solution? Do you have a question you want to ask me, or another one of Softchoice’s dedicated VMware experts? Leave a comment below.