BACKUP IN
A VIRTUAL WORLD
Data-Protection Challenges in Virtual Server Environments
Data protection for virtual environments became crucial when end users began
virtualizing tier-one, mission-critical applications – a trend that will accelerate
rapidly this year. This is leading IT departments to reevaluate their backup/
recovery strategies, implementations and, in some cases, suppliers.
IM
INFORMATION
MANAGEMENT
4 FINDINGS
5 IMPLICATIONS
1 BOTTOM LINE
• Lack of adequate data protection
can be an obstacle in virtualizing
mission-critical applications. • Virtualization is accelerating
ongoing trends toward
technologies such as disk-based
backup and data de-duplication. • As the move toward virtualizing
mission-critical applications
accelerates, end users should
reevaluate their data-protection
products, architectures and
vendors to ensure adequate
backup and recovery in order to
meet stringent RPO, RTO and SLA
requirements. PAGE 1
• Hypervisor-based APIs such as
VADP and CBT have, to a degree,
‘leveled the playing field’ between
backup incumbents and VM
backup specialists. PAGE 10
• The market for virtualization
backup and high availability is
expected to grow at a 43% CAGR
through 2014. PAGE 17
• In large part due to virtualization,
end users are more willing than
ever to switch backup applications
and vendors. PAGE 23
PAGE 4
• Backup vendors are increasingly
reliant on enabling technologies
provided by the hypervisor
vendors – although hypervisor
vendors such as VMware pose a
competitive threat. PAGE 10
• End users are considering
alternative data-protection
technologies such as array-based
snapshots and replication, often
in conjunction with traditional
backup software. PAGE 15
• M&A activity could pick up this
year as vendors look to fill the
gaps in their data-protection
portfolios. PAGE 23
• VM backup specialists pose a
formidable threat to the marketshare incumbents. PAGE 30
APRIL 2012
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i
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SECTION 1: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1
1.1 INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 METHODOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
SECTION 2: MARKET IN CONTEXT 4
2.1 THE SHIFT TOWARD VIRTUALIZING MISSION-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS . . . 4
Figure 1: Virtualization of Different Workloads . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Figure 2: Predominant Impact for Server Virtualization on Storage . . . . . 6
Figure 3: Drivers of Capacity Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
SECTION 3: KEY TRENDS/TECHNOLOGIES
10
3.1 LEVERAGING HYPERVISOR TOOLS AND APIS . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Figure 4: VM Protection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11
Figure 5: Desire for VM Backup Without Agents . . . . . . . . . . .13
3.2 ARRAY-BASED SNAPSHOTS, REPLICATION AND BACKUP SOFTWARE . . . 15
SECTION 4: MARKET UPDATE
17
4.1 MARKET SIZING & GROWTH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
17
Figure 6: The Backup and HA Opportunity (Virtual Environments Only) . .
17
Figure 7: Total Cloud-Enabling Technologies Revenue Breakdown . . . . . 18
Figure 8: Cloud-Enabling Technologies Lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Figure 9: Backup & HA Revenue by Geography . . . . . . . . . . .
20
Figure 10: Backup & HA Revenue by Segment . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Figure 11: Backup & HA Revenue by Vertical . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4.2 FUNDING ACTIVITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Figure 12: Funding for Data-Protection Startups . . . . . . . . . .
22
4.3 M&A ACTIVITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
23
Figure 13: 2010 Key Storage Acquisitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Figure 14: 2011 Key Storage Acquisitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
4.4 POTENTIAL ACQUIRERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4.5 POTENTIAL ACQUISITION TARGETS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
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4.6 VENDOR LANDSCAPE: RISE OF THE VM BACKUP, DR SPECIALISTS . . . . 30
Figure 15: Backup Vendors for Virtual Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . 30
SECTION 5: EVALUATION CRITERIA
35
SECTION 6: CASE STUDIES
37
6.1 BANK USES DIFFERENT SOFTWARE TO PROTECT VIRTUAL AND PHYSICAL
SERVERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
6.2 MEDICAL CENTER STANDARDIZES ON ONE BACKUP APP FOR CENTRALIZED
MANAGEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
6.3 TOP DATA-PROTECTION CRITERION FOR HEALTHCARE PROVIDER: ULTRAFAST RESTORES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
SECTION 7: RECOMMENDATIONS41
INDEX OF COMPANIES
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42
iii
SECTION 1
Executive Summary
1.1 INTRODUCTION
By now, the benefits of server virtualization are clear to all IT administrators: operational
efficiency through consolidation; reduced capital expenditures; improved hardware utilization; application mobility; hardware commoditization; decreased datacenter footprint;
reduced floor space, power and cooling requirements; and simplified disaster recovery, high
availability and failover. The benefits are so well understood that we predict that more than
50% of all x86 application workloads will be virtualized by the end of 2012.
However, all of these benefits are not without trade-offs. While server virtualization can
simplify and improve data protection, there is also a reverse effect: data protection can
become more difficult and complex, particularly when ‘VM sprawl’ creeps in, and is often a
key barrier to adoption of virtualization. VM sprawl, coupled with how easy it is to create
VMs (minutes to provision, vs. hours or days for physical servers) and move them, can lead
to management headaches, which is why data-protection vendors have introduced technologies to automatically discover new VMs and to track VM movement.
The issues surrounding data protection have become paramount as more and more
mission-critical applications (e.g., ERP, CRM, databases, email) are being virtualized,
which is a key theme of this report (covered in more detail in Section 2.1). Put simply, IT
managers are unwilling to virtualize tier-one applications until they are certain that those
applications are well protected and that they can recover VMs, files, applications or parts
of applications in a timely-enough fashion to meet the stringent service-level agreements
(SLAs) required by mission-critical applications.
One of the key data-protection challenges in virtual environments, where the VM-to-host
ratios are increasing rapidly, is resource contention. As we will we see in this report, this is
an area where the backup/recovery vendors are focusing their R&D efforts, and where we
see considerable innovation. The primary goal in this context is to offload as much work
as possible from the already overtaxed VM/hypervisor environment, while also decreasing
burgeoning backup windows.
In the physical server world, data protection was simpler and more straightforward because
there was a one-to-one mapping between a server, application and storage. But virtualization breaks this model because a single physical server can host many VMs, operating
systems and applications. And all of these components share physical resources, including
storage, which leads to intense resource contention. Further complicating the data-protection challenge is the ever-increasing ratio of VMs to physical servers, which also leads to
resource contention. Whereas two to four VMs per server was common a few years ago,
we’re now seeing 10, 20 or more VMs being hosted on a single physical server.
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1
Compounding the backup/recovery management challenge is the fact that most IT environments still include a mix of both physical and virtual servers. Should IT administrators try to
protect both environments with the same software from the same vendor, or opt for ‘best of
breed’ software for the different environments? The former approach simplifies data-protection management by decreasing the number of software products and management skills
required, but the latter approach may lead to lower costs and better performance.
And who’s in charge of protecting virtual environments, anyway – the VM administrators,
or the storage specialists? Historically, storage departments were in charge of evaluating,
procuring, deploying and managing backup/recovery products, but with the advent of virtualization, it is often the VM administrators that call the shots – often without consulting with
the storage departments. This is one reason why VM backup specialists such as Veeam Software, Quest Software and PHD Virtual Technologies have been able to crack the crowded
backup market with such a great deal of success: They often targeted the VM administrators,
rather than the storage specialists. And as more and more storage functions move up into
the hypervisor layer (e.g., virtual backup appliances, hypervisor-based replication, etc.), VM
administrators, rather than storage specialists, will be handling more and more storage tasks.
Prior to the virtualization tsunami, IT organizations used backup/recovery techniques and
architectures that for the most part did not change much for decades. And they relied on a
handful of proven incumbent vendors. However, server virtualization has caused many IT
organizations to rethink their backup methodologies, as well as their vendors.
Although the same handful of vendors that had the lion’s share of backup in the physical
server arena still have the lion’s share of the virtual server backup market, the VM backup
specialists have rocked the boat by providing innovative approaches to backup/recovery
that are tightly tailored to the virtualization layer. The startups were able to differentiate by
writing their code from scratch to take advantage of technologies provided by the virtualization platform vendors. Unlike the incumbent backup vendors, the VM backup specialists were
unshackled by ‘legacy’ code and agent-based architectures, and were able to adapt quickly to
changes in the virtual platform architectures.
However, thanks in large part to hypervisor vendors – most notably, VMware – delivering
new enabling technologies focused squarely on data protection (see Section 3.1), the incumbents have made up a lot of lost ground. In essence, the enabling technologies from the
hypervisor vendors have, to a degree, leveled the playing field.
Nevertheless, based on our end-user research, we think the data-protection market is at an
inflection point where users are more likely than ever to rethink, and in many cases redesign, their data-protection policies and approaches. This does not necessarily mean switching
vendors, although in many cases that will be the prudent – albeit difficult – choice.
Aside from virtualization itself, the key reason why now is the time to rethink data protection is that the move toward virtualizing mission-critical applications – as opposed to tiertwo and tier-three applications – is well under way. The virtualization of business-critical
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applications puts renewed emphasis on having iron-clad data-protection policies and architectures in place and, again, brings us to an inflection point where rethinking data protection
is strongly advised.
However, even though we are at an inflection point, the data-protection market remains
a ‘sticky’ one (i.e., one where users are often unwilling to consider alternative products or
vendors, in large part due to the heavy investments they’ve already made in their existing
backup infrastructure). As such, although they face intense competition from the VM backup
specialists, the incumbent vendors are likely to retain their market shares (at least in mixed
physical-and-virtual environments).
This report examines the data-protection market from a virtual server perspective. It examines key trends and technologies; reviews the vendor landscape, VC funding and M&A
activity; presents case studies highlighting some of the themes in the report; and provides
recommendations for both vendors and end users.
1.2 METHODOLOGY
This report on data-protection in virtual server environments is based on a series of in-depth
interviews with a variety of stakeholders in the industry, including IT managers at end-user
organizations across multiple sectors, technology vendors, managed service providers, telcos
and VCs. This research was supplemented by additional primary research, including attendance at a number of trade shows and industry events, as well as end-user surveys.
Reports such as this one represent a holistic perspective on key emerging markets in the
enterprise IT space. These markets evolve quickly, though, so 451 Research offers additional
services that provide critical marketplace updates. These updated reports and perspectives
are presented on a daily basis via the company’s core intelligence service – the 451 Market
Insight Service. Forward-looking M&A analysis and perspectives on strategic acquisitions
and the liquidity environment for technology companies are also updated regularly via the
Market Insight Service, which is backed by the industry-leading 451 M&A KnowledgeBase.
Emerging technologies and markets are also covered in additional 451 practices, including
our CloudScape, Enterprise Security, Eco-Efficient IT, Information Management, Commercial
Adoption of Open Source (CAOS), Infrastructure Computing for the Enterprise (ICE), Datacenter Technologies (DCT) and 451 Market Monitor services. All of these 451 services, which
are accessible via the Web, provide critical and timely analysis specifically focused on the
business of enterprise IT innovation.
This report was written by Dave Simpson, Senior Analyst, Storage, with substantial assistance from Simon Robinson, Research Director, Storage. Any questions about the methodology should be addressed to Dave Simpson at: [email protected]
For more information about 451 Research, please go to: www.451research.com
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3
SECTION 2
Market In Context
2.1 THE SHIFT TOWARD VIRTUALIZING MISSION-CRITICAL
APPLICATIONS
In the context of data protection for virtual infrastructure, the number-one trend is
the movement toward virtualizing mission-critical, or tier-one, applications (see Figure
1). We consider this to be the key trend because it puts renewed focus on data protection. In fact, backup, recovery, business continuity and disaster recovery (which are all
merging) have become the top priority for many companies as they virtualize missioncritical applications. No IT manager is going to virtualize mission-critical applications
without ensuring that the data-protection mechanisms are rock-solid.
FIGURE 1: VIRTUALIZATION OF DIFFERENT WORKLOADS
Development and Test
65%
Web Servers
55%
Application Servers (Non-ERP, Non-Email)
51%
Servers Hosting VDI
44%
Custom-built Application
43%
Productivity/Collaboration (Email, SharePoint)
38%
ERP
35%
Databases/Data Warehouse
34%
CRM
34%
Communications Servers
31%
Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)
28%
E-commerce
24%
Source: TheInfoPro, a Service of 451 Research
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Most companies started their virtualization projects in test and development environments,
beginning around 2003. In these environments, bulletproof data protection was not a high
priority, and most companies just continued using their existing backup products and methodologies (if, in fact, they backed up at all). Once they were comfortable with virtualization
in test/dev environments, companies moved toward virtualizing non-mission-critical tiertwo and tier-three applications (e.g., file servers and Web servers) and consolidating applications. The importance of data protection increased at this stage, but it has now taken center
stage as companies begin virtualizing mission-critical applications, which provides the
foundation for cloud services.
Although some cutting-edge companies began virtualizing mission-critical applications
three or four years ago, 2011 marked the beginning of mainstream virtualization of these
applications, and we expect this to be a key trend in 2012 and beyond. The virtualization
of mission-critical applications was the key theme of the 2011 VMworld conference, and we
expect it to be the key theme of this year’s conference.
Common mission-critical applications that are being virtualized include Microsoft Exchange
and SQL Server, as well as Oracle databases and SAP applications. Many of these applications are based on relational database technologies, which pose challenges to backup applications because it’s crucial that databases are in an application-consistent state for backup
and restore. (We cover this topic in more detail in the next section.)
One downside to the virtualization of more and more applications is that it is a key contributor to exploding capacity growth, as shown in the results of a recent end-user study
conducted by TheInfoPro (see Figures 2 and 3), which puts a significant burden on backup
administrators. (It’s interesting to note that only 8% of the participants in the study said
that server virtualization reduced storage costs.)
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5
FIGURE 2: PREDOMINANT IMPACT FOR SERVER VIRTUALIZATION ON STORAGE
Other
6% Reduced
Cost
8%
Needs SAN
Rather Than
DAS 10%
Capacity Growth
50%
Troubleshooting
Complexity
Increased
10%
Density Causing
Bottlenecks
16%
Source: TheInfoPro, a Service of 451 Research
FIGURE 3: DRIVERS OF CAPACITY GROWTH
Server Consolidation and Virtualization
47%
Increased Needs of Existing Business Applications
33%
Poor Archiving
31%
New Business Applications
29%
Disaster Recovery
20%
Backup Retention Increases
17%
Regulatory Compliance
13%
Business Mergers
11%
Data Sharing via Duplication
Performance Improvement
Desktop Virtualization and/or VDI
Other
10%
9%
7%
21%
Source: TheInfoPro, a Service of 451 Research
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The move toward virtualizing mission-critical applications re-emphasizes a longstanding trend in data protection: increased focus on the recoverability of data and
applications, as opposed to just backup. This trend calls for new technologies that can
validate recoverability and provide better visibility into virtualized environments that
are changing more rapidly than they ever did in the physical server world. This in turn
creates more daunting challenges in providing adequate data protection.
The virtualization of mission-critical applications puts increased pressure on dataprotection vendors to improve their ability to meet much more stringent recovery point
objectives (RPOs), recovery time objectives (RTOs) and SLAs. Mission-critical applications may require RPO/RTOs of hours or minutes. This has led to a lot of innovation in
disaster recovery, particularly among startups. In addition, it has led to a blurring of the
lines between backup/recovery, business continuity and disaster recovery, with many
vendors now addressing all of these data-protection functions with a single product or
integrated suite.
VMware’s introduction of vSphere 5 in late 2011 made it much easier to virtualize
mission-critical applications because it significantly increased the amount of storage,
CPUs, memory and bandwidth supported by a single VM. As IT organizations migrate
to vSphere 5, the trend toward virtualizing mission-critical applications will accelerate
rapidly.
The virtualization of mission-critical applications is spurring end users to evaluate
different approaches to data protection, including:
• Host-based backups protect the entire host server and all VMs running on the hosts,
but may not provide granular restores of individual VMs, or of applications or files on
the VMs.
• Guest-level backups protect individual VMs and provide granular restore of VM data,
but may not be able to provide application-specific protection.
• Application-level backup protects individual applications running on VMs (e.g.,
Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint) and typically provides granular restore of
application-specific data such as individual Exchange mailboxes/messages or
SharePoint folders.
• Replication (which typically complements traditional backup/recovery software)
captures every change made to data, files and databases, and eliminates storage
devices as single points of failure. When performed off-site, replication provides
disaster recovery. Replication often includes continuous data protection (CDP)
technology and the ability to rewind back to a known ‘good’ point in time prior to
data loss.
• High-availability software monitors systems and applications, and automatically fails
over to another server or VM to prevent unplanned outages.
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7
Which ‘level’ of data protection is most appropriate depends on the criticality of the
data and application. But as companies continue to virtualize mission-critical applications, we are seeing more emphasis on high-availability technologies, application-level
backups, and increased use of snapshots and replication (see Section 3.2). Another key
trend in this context is that vendors are integrating multiple levels – and functions – of
data protection in integrated suites, which is good news for IT organizations that want
to reduce the number of data-protection products and vendors they rely on.
Virtualization and, more recently, the virtualization of mission-critical applications
has altered the backup landscape. For one, as noted earlier, it has led to an explosion
in the amount of data that needs to be backed up. This in turn led to expanded backup
windows. As a result of these factors, end users have accelerated their use of technologies such as disk-based backup (while moving away from tape-based backup); data
de-duplication (both client-side and target-side); and array-based snapshots and replication (sometimes in lieu of ‘standard’ backup software). Although these are the same
trends that have been occurring for years in the physical server world, their benefits are
accentuated even more in virtual server environments.
Virtualization has also led to an unprecedented number of startups entering the market
(see Section 4). These startups saw the weaknesses in existing backup and disaster
recovery architectures and were quick to exploit the advantages of virtualization. This
has led to a dizzying array of options for end users.
Even as some of the trends in data protection for virtual servers are the same ones that
have been ongoing in the physical server data-protection space – including increased
use of de-duplication and disk-to-disk (D2D) backup – virtualization has accelerated
the trend toward disk-based backup, and away from tape, because the need for faster
backups and restores is greater in virtual environments due to the increasingly large
data sets, rapidly proliferating VMs, and the virtualization of mission-critical applications with stringent RPO/RTO/SLA requirements.
Similarly, virtualization is spurring the already-strong trend toward data de-duplication and compression techniques. Because virtual environments include a much higher
amount of duplicate data than do physical environments, data de-duplication – whether
source-based, target-based or both – has become commonplace in virtual environments. Most, but not all, backup vendors offer native source-side de-duplication, and
most of the larger vendors (e.g., EMC, Symantec, IBM, HP) offer source- and target-side
de-duplication.
Whether it’s in physical or virtual environments, the key trends in de-duplication
include a move toward appliances (as opposed to software-only de-duplication) and a
move toward combining source-based and target-based de-duplication. Perhaps the best
evidence of this is EMC’s success in leveraging (and to a degree integrating) its sourcebased Avamar products and its target-based Data Domain de-duplication appliances (as
well as its Networker backup software), which has proven to be particularly appealing in
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virtual environments. Symantec is another example of a vendor that emphasizes options
in where users perform de-duplication – at the source, backup/media server, or at the
de-duplication backup appliance.
From a data-protection perspective, one of the key benefits of virtualization is that
it enables low-cost approaches to replication and disaster recovery. Although most
companies with very stringent RPO/RTO/SLA requirements in tier-one applications will
still use expensive array-based replication, a number of alternatives now exist that will
enable SMBs to implement DR strategies that were previously affordable by only large
enterprises.
For example, traditional replication specialists such as Neverfail and Vision Solutions
(with its acquisition of Double-Take Software) have fine-tuned their host-based replication software for VM environments. And VMware now offers host/hypervisor-based
replication (vSphere Replication) as part of its Site Recovery Manager (SRM). Further
calling attention to the need for affordable DR to protect mission-critical applications,
a number of startups are leveraging virtualization for innovative approaches to DR,
including vendors such as Zerto, VirtualSharp and Continuity Software.
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SECTION 3
Key Trends/Technologies
3.1 LEVERAGING HYPERVISOR TOOLS AND APIS
One of the key trends in data protection for virtual servers is the move toward ‘hypervisor-aware’ backup, in which backup vendors leverage the tools and APIs supplied by
hypervisor vendors, most notably VMware.
In the early days of virtualization, the incumbent backup software vendors did not
have purpose-built software for virtual environments, so most end-user companies
just continued to use their existing backup software in virtual environments. (Many
still do, although the software has been optimized for virtualization.) This involved
running agents on each VM (typically in the guest operating system), an approach
that was very similar to backup architectures in physical server environments where
backup agents run in every protected physical server. In this scenario, VMs are simply
treated as any other files.
However, in virtual environments, the agent-based approach often consumes too
many host CPU, memory and I/O resources, leading to server and I/O performance
bottlenecks and ballooning backup windows. Agent-based backup can also be a costly
approach because companies typically need to license agent, or client, software for
each VM. And agent-based approaches to backup can also create severe management
headaches because of ‘agent sprawl.’ Obviously, all of these problems are exacerbated
as the ratio of VMs to host servers increases.
Nevertheless, even today many users continue to rely on traditional agent-based
backup software for file-based backup/recovery, as shown in the results of TheInfoPro
end-user study data cited earlier (see Figure 4). This is in part due merely to the fact
that backup administrators are comfortable with the agent-based approach, which is
what they are used to in physical server environments. In addition, agent-based architectures can provide application awareness and more granular application-specific
recovery. It’s interesting to note that some companies use multiple backup methods
(which explains why the percentages in the chart add up to more than 100%).
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FIGURE 4: VM PROTECTION
Back up the same as you
did for physical servers
Back up using image-level
capability of the backup product
67%
27%
33%
73%
Back up via the guest
operating system infrastructure
or the backup agent
16%
84%
Other
16%
84%
Source: TheInfoPro, a Service of 451 Research
The VM backup specialists entered the market in the 2006-2007 time frame with
image-based data-protection software that was integrated with the VMware hypervisor and did not require agents on every VM. Prior to the introduction of VMware’s
ESXi, many backup vendors used agents running on the VMware Service Console to
execute backups, leveraging snapshots for crash consistency. This enabled users to back
up entire VM files or VMDKs, but it did not provide file-level restore, and it required
processing by the ESX server.
The next evolution for many vendors was to leverage VMware Consolidated Backup
(VCB), which offloaded backup processing from the ESX server onto a proxy Windows
server. In this approach, a single agent runs on a physical VCB proxy server, which
eliminates the need for agents on every VM or guest operating system. VCB also facilitated incremental backups and file-level recovery without the need to recover entire
images, and handled quiescing and restarting VM operations and the applications in
the guest OS. But VCB had a lot of drawbacks; for example, it required an additional
download and install, and also required a two-step process for full VM image backup.
In addition, VCB did not enable incremental VM image backup or restore, and full VM
image restores required a VMware converter tool. And VCB required more hardware
(server and storage), multistep recovery through the proxy server and then to primary
storage, and it often required scripting. Because of all of its limitations, VCB saw limited
adoption among end users.
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11
The VM backup/recovery picture changed dramatically in 2009 when VMware introduced
vSphere 4.0, which included the vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP). VADP replaced
VCB in early 2010 and provided a number of significant data-protection advantages. VADP is
included in all licensed versions of vSphere, but is not included in the free versions.
In a VADP scenario, the typical steps are to (a) quiesce the virtual servers to get a consistent
set of VM image files; (b) use the VADP-enabled agent to read the VM image files from the
datastores; (c) copy the image files to a backup disk target; and (d) release the virtual servers
for production operations.
VADP provided a number of benefits for both backup software vendors and end users. For
example, it enabled backup software to perform off-host, LAN-free backups of VMs from
a centralized backup server or VM without requiring backup agents or backup processing
within each VM on the host. One advantage of this is that it offloads backup processing
from hosts, which in turn allows the hosts to run more VMs. In addition, it minimizes the
server performance bottleneck. VADP also facilitates incremental, differential and full-image
backup/restore.
VADP leverages the snapshot capabilities of VMware vStorage VMFS and automates the
process of creating the snapshot, quiescing the VM disk file, and presenting the snapshot to
the backup software. The APIs enable backup across a SAN without downtime for VMs. As a
result, backups can be performed non-disruptively at any time of the day without requiring
extended backup windows and the downtime to applications and users that is typically associated with long backup windows. VADP also facilitates agent-less backup and image-based
backup.
To a degree, VADP ‘leveled the playing field’ between the incumbent backup vendors and the
VM backup specialists by providing a standardized methodology for backup that is accessible
to all vendors (as well as users that prefer to write homegrown backup applications).
Virtually all backup vendors are now leveraging VADP, as well as agent-less backup and
image-based backup/restore, although at the time of this report, VMware listed only the
following vendors on its VADP partner list: Acronis, CA Technologies, CommVault, EMC
(Avamar and Networker products), HP, IBM, Quest Software, Symantec and Veeam Software.
However, the degree to which the vendors leverage the APIs may vary, which is where differentiation will take place. In addition, vendors vary in how quickly they leverage the latest
versions of VADP and other hypervisor-based backup/recovery-related tools and APIs.
The general trend among backup software vendors has been away from agent-based backup
to agent-less architectures that offload backup work from the VM environment – a trend that
was fueled by VADP – although many users still back up VMs the same way they back up
physical servers, as shown in Figure 4 earlier. However, according to the same end-user study,
IT professionals overwhelmingly prefer agent-less backup architectures (see Figure 5).
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FIGURE 5: DESIRE FOR VM BACKUP WITHOUT AGENTS
Don’t
Know
9%
No
14%
Yes
77%
Source: TheInfoPro, a Service of 451 Research
Although the trend is clearly toward agent-less backup of VMs, in many cases – such
as certain mission-critical applications with underlying databases – agents can be
beneficial, and sometimes even necessary. Some vendors argue that agents provide a
tighter integration with the application for functions such as quiescing applications,
while other vendors argue that agents overload host resources and introduce management complexity. The agent-vs.-agent-less controversy raged a few years ago, but
has died down recently because the bottom line is that users have a choice of how
to implement backup and recovery: with or without agents, and at the file, volume,
image or application level.
VMware’s view on the agent-vs.-agent-less issue is that end users should go with
agent-less approaches whenever it makes sense, although in some cases agents
may provide advantages. In addition to VADP, another key backup technology
that VMware introduced in vSphere 4 was Changed Block Tracking (CBT), which is
included in VADP and is now used by virtually all data-protection vendors. One key
benefit of CBT is that it facilitates, and significantly speeds up, block-level incremental backups without requiring a scan of the guest OS file system. With CBT,
virtual disk block changes are tracked from outside virtual machines, in the virtualization layer. Backup software applications can request transmission of only the
blocks that changed since the last backup (as opposed to the entire VMDK image). In
other words, backup applications call VADP to request that the VMkernel return only
blocks of data that have changed on a virtual disk since the last backup snapshot.
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13
In short, one of the key trends in backup/recovery for virtual servers is that backup
vendors are integrating more tightly with hypervisor-based data-protection technologies
such as VADP and CBT. We expect VMware to continue adding APIs to improve data
protection, eventually including application-specific APIs for mission-critical applications such as Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle databases.
Although almost all backup vendors are leveraging technologies such as VADP and
CBT, they vary in terms of how rapidly they integrate with those APIs. Although VADP
and CBT were introduced in 2009, it wasn’t until 2011 that some vendors had fully integrated with those technologies. Backup vendors also vary in terms of how tightly they
integrate with VMware’s APIs.
APIs such as VADP and CBT have obviously improved the data-protection picture from
the backup side of the equation, but perhaps more importantly, they have significantly
improved the restore side of the equation – leading to many vendors claiming ‘instant’
or ‘near-instant’ restores (files, volumes, VMs). In reality, best-case restores are typically
measured in minutes. However, that’s a huge improvement over the hours that were
required for restores only a couple of years ago.
In addition to integration with hypervisor-based data-protection APIs such as VADP
and CBT, another trend is toward backup/recovery vendors integrating more and more
tightly with the vCenter Server management platform. All data-protection vendors
are pursuing this goal, albeit with varying degrees of integration. This trend is critical because it enables VMware administrators – as opposed to backup administration specialists – to perform backup/recovery operations from a familiar management
console. In some cases, creating backup policies or restoring VMs requires only a few
clicks in the vCenter console.
This report focuses primarily on VMware environments for a number of reasons. First,
VMware still accounts for the vast majority of the x86 virtualization market. According
to 451 Research, VMware accounts for 91% of the hypervisor market and 62% of the
overall (hypervisor plus administration) server virtualization market. Second, most of
the R&D and innovation in the data-protection market is focused on VMware infrastructures (although many data-protection vendors are embracing multi-hypervisor
strategies, typically starting with VMware and moving on to Microsoft Hyper-V and
Citrix XenServer). Third, data-protection vendors believe that other hypervisor vendors
– most notably, Microsoft – are years behind VMware in terms of offering technologies to facilitate data protection. For example, Microsoft does not offer technology that
equates to VMware’s VADP.
We expect Windows Server 8 to include some significant storage-specific enhancements, and future versions of this report will delve more deeply into Hyper-V backup/
recovery, which may be the next battlefield for virtualization data protection.
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3.2 ARRAY-BASED SNAPSHOTS, REPLICATION AND BACKUP
SOFTWARE
Most IT organizations use a mix of products, often from different vendors, to meet their
data-protection requirements, including backup/restore software, replication products
(hardware or software) and/or high-availability failover/clustering products.
One of the key trends we’re seeing is that end users are increasingly relying on hardware array-based snapshots – typically in conjunction with either software- or arraybased replication – as their primary means of data protection, at least in the context of
tier-one mission-critical application environments. In a recent end-user study of large
enterprises (with revenues of greater than $150m) conducted by TheInfoPro, 73% of
the IT participants cited backup software as their primary backup/recovery mechanism,
while 27% said that they relied primarily on array-based snapshots.
We expect this trend to accelerate as more and more mission-critical applications are
virtualized, and to become prevalent in environments with heavy workloads and stringent RPO/RTO/SLA requirements. These environments may require an RPO of a few
hours – a situation where recovery from the previous night’s backup is unacceptable.
Array-based point-in-time (PIT) snapshots (which typically leverage snapshots from the
VMware virtualization layer) enable low-latency, very fast creation of recovery copies
with minimal impact on production systems, while providing space efficiency (when
used with replication) and near instantaneous backup and restore. Snapshot-based
backup can eliminate the backup window, while offloading data-protection processing
to the disk array and improving virtual server performance. And the combination of
array-based snapshots and replication can simplify disaster recovery.
Some IT organizations use snapshots and replication in lieu of, or as an alternative to,
traditional backup/recovery software. In this case, they use management tools from the
array vendors (e.g., EMC, NetApp, IBM, HDS, HP, Dell). However, a more recent trend is
the integration of backup applications with array-based snapshots and replication. In
this scenario, local snapshots are created on the primary array for quick recovery, while
copies are offloaded to the backup software for longer-term retention. The backup software vendor provides functionality such as cataloguing and managing the array-based
snapshots, which in turn can provide granular recovery. In addition, this approach
provides a single management console for heterogeneous array snapshots. (Some
backup vendors have been managing snapshots for years, but until recently, it was relatively rudimentary, and they have more recently implemented much deeper integration
with array-based snapshots.)
Today, the trend is toward users leveraging array-based snapshots and replication,
but we are on the cusp of a trend where the use of snapshots, replication and backup/
recovery software will converge. This is in part due to the fact users will ideally want
cataloguing functionality and unified management across heterogeneous arrays.
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15
Hardware-based snapshots alone have the advantages of speed, scalability and rapid
recovery, but also have the disadvantages of high cost, complexity and, sometimes, the need
for manual effort such as scripting. Traditional backups, on the other hand, have the advantages of affordable retention, hardware independence and catalog-based restores, yet may
have the disadvantages of slow recovery times and a negative impact on the production environment. As such, combining the two (array-based snapshots and backup/recovery software,
together with either hardware- or software-based replication) could provide an optimum
data-protection scenario for many environments. And we think the trend toward this
approach will pick up this year.
Perhaps the best example of the trend toward integration of backup software with arraybased snapshots and replication is CommVault’s activity in this area, particularly its OEM
partnership with NetApp around the SnapProtect product. (In addition to NetApp’s arrays,
CommVault’s SnapProtect integrates with virtually all the major disk arrays and snapshots.)
In 2011, the two companies inked an OEM deal under which they have integrated elements
of CommVault’s Simpana backup software (including global cataloging, snapshot management and tape management) with NetApp’s snapshot and replication software (SnapMirror
and SnapVault) under the SnapProtect brand. (Somewhat confusingly, CommVault recently
renamed SnapProtect as IntelliSnap as part of the OEM agreement. NetApp licensed some of
the SnapProtect technology and the rights to the product name and now sells the resulting
technology under the NetApp SnapProtect brand.) The deal is positioned as allowing NetApp
to offer customers a more application-aware and integrated way to manage data protection
within a NetApp environment, encompassing snapshots, replication and archive copies to
tape. (In heterogeneous environments, NetApp partners with Syncsort.)
NetApp and CommVault have been at the forefront of advocating the use of array-based
snapshots, replication and backup software, but more recent announcements indicate that
this will be an industry-wide trend. For example, Symantec earlier this year introduced a
Replication Director option when it rolled out the 7.5 version of its NetBackup software.
Replication Director tightly integrates NetBackup with NetApp’s snapshots and replication.
(Support for other vendors’ arrays/snapshots is expected in the NetBackup 7.6 release, which
is due in the fourth quarter 2012.)
Even more recently, Asigra announced tight integration with NetApp’s snapshots (as well
as block-level support for VMware’s CBT) in the 11.2 version of its Asigra Cloud Backup
software. At the same time, the two companies announced a Data Protection-as-a-Service
(DPaaS) program targeted at MSPs and telcos, which leverages the snapshot integration.
One of the key goals behind using backup/recovery software in conjunction with array-based
snapshots is to simplify the management of snaps and replication in heterogeneous environments. So far most of the action centers on NetApp’s products and environments. This is in
part because NetApp is easier for the backup software vendors to work with since it does not
have its own backup software, but it’s also due to the fact that NetApp has relatively welldocumented APIs for its snapshot technology.
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SECTION 4
Market Update
4.1 MARKET SIZING & GROWTH
The market for virtual server data protection is extremely crowded and competitive. A
recent Market Monitor report from 451 Research (‘Cloud-Enabling Technologies Segment
Focus: Backup & High Availability’) listed almost 30 vendors that have backup/HA products for virtual environments, not including cloud storage (or online backup) vendors. If
you include backup, recovery, business continuity, disaster recovery and HA in the dataprotection bucket, the list of competitors goes well beyond 40 vendors.
According to the report, a conservative estimate of the revenue generated by backup and
HA vendors in the virtual server space was $499.5m in 2010. Note that this applies only to
revenue from products used in virtual environments, and does not include revenue from
backup/HA products used in physical server environments. (It is difficult to size this market
because some vendors are unable, or unwilling, to provide accurate revenue breakouts by
virtual vs. physical environments.) More importantly, however, the research indicates that
this market is expected to grow at a whopping 43% compound annual growth rate (CAGR)
through 2014, surging from $972m in 2011 to $1.4bn in 2012 to more than $2.1bn in 2014.
FIGURE 6: THE BACKUP AND HA OPPORTUNITY (VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS ONLY)
$2,108
$1,796
$1,442
$972
$499
$221
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Source: 451 Research
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17
The Market Monitor report is part of a series of reports on cloud-enabling technologies, and it’s interesting to note that backup and HA products for virtual environments account for a sizable portion of the total market for cloud-enabling technologies,
including (in addition to backup and HA) server virtualization, management, I/O virtualization, security and on-ramp (or cloud gateway) products.
FIGURE 7: TOTAL CLOUD-ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES REVENUE BREAKDOWN
Server Virtualization
Management
Backup & HA
I/O Virtualization
Security
On-Ramps/Cloud Brokers
Source: 451 Research
Our research shows that backup and HA products are among the key cloud-enabling
technologies (along with management and automation products) that are being emphasized in the ‘second phase’ of the cloud computing lifecycle, which began in early 2010.
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FIGURE 8: CLOUD-ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES LIFECYCLE
Products
On-Ramps/Cloud Brokers
On-Premises Cloud Management
‘Focus shifting toward Private Clouds’
$13.5bn
Phase 3 (movement into private & hybrid Clouds)
Products
Hypervisor
Administration
‘Initial adoption’
Products
Management,
Automation,
Backup & HA
‘Management a Must’
ling ue
ab even
n
-E R
ud ies
Clo olog
hn
Tec
Phase 2 (~70% of virtualizable servers)
$2.7bn
Phase 1 (~30% of virtualizable servers)
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Source: 451 Research
The ongoing shift toward virtualizing mission-critical applications and the increasing
need for regulatory compliance are some of the key market accelerators for backup and
HA in virtual environments. Since adoption of virtualization has been more rapid in the
US relative to other regions, it’s not surprising that the majority (55%) of revenue from
backup/HA products for virtual environments comes from the US. Our research indicates that one-third of the total revenue comes from EMEA, and the remaining 12%
comes from the APAC region.
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19
FIGURE 9: BACKUP & HA REVENUE BY GEOGRAPHY
APAC 12%
EMEA 33%
US 55%
Source: 451 Research
It’s also not surprising that the majority (59%) of revenue comes from larger enterprises (where the benefits of virtualization are highest, and the need for backup/HA is
more critical), while 41% of revenue from backup/HA products for virtual environments
comes from SMBs.
FIGURE 10: BACKUP & HA REVENUE BY SEGMENT
SMB 41%
Enterprise 59%
Source: 451 Research
Meanwhile, revenue from this market segment is spread fairly evenly among vertical
industries, with technology/telecom and finance at the top.
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FIGURE 11: BACKUP & HA REVENUE BY VERTICAL
Retail &
Consumer 6%
Other
13%
Technology
& Telecom
19%
Manufacturing
& Automotive
15%
Healthcare
12%
Financial
(Banking,
Insurance)
19%
Government
(State & Local,
Federal) &
Education 16%
Source: 451 Research
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21
4.2 FUNDING ACTIVITY
In the data-protection market, most of the VC has gone to startups for which virtual
environments are a key – but not the only – part of their target markets. Although
funding for data-protection startups pales in comparison to the funding that has been
funneled into storage market segments, such as solid-state storage, it is still notable,
given how crowded the backup/recovery market has become. Figure 12 shows a representative sampling of startups and funding activity.
FIGURE 12: FUNDING FOR DATA-PROTECTION STARTUPS
STARTUP
FOUNDED
TOTAL
FUNDING
# OF
CUSTOMERS
KEY INVESTORS
AppAssure Software 2006
(acquired by Dell
02/12)
$6m
6,000
Bain Capital Ventures
Actifio
2009
$57.5m
100
Greylock Partners, North
Bridge Venture Partners
Axcient
2006
$33.5m
3,000
Scale Venture Partners,
Allegis Capital, Peninsula
Ventures, Thomvest Ventures
Cofio Software
2006
$4m
120
Angel funding
Continuity Software
2005
$9.4m
250
Giza Venture Capital
CTERA Networks
2008
Undisclosed
3,500
Benchmark Capital, Venrock
Associates, Cisco
Druva Software
2007
$17m
1,000
Nexus Venture Partners,
Sequoia Capital, Indian Angel
Network Services
KineticD
2003 (as Data
Deposit Box;
re-named
KineticD 2010)
no external
funding
22,000
N/A
PHD Virtual
Technologies
2005
Undisclosed
4,300
Insight Venture Partners
(acquired PHD Virtual in
2008), Citrix
QuorumLabs
2008
$21m
150
Airtek Capital Group
Veeam Software
2006
Self-funded
28,000
N/A
VirtualSharp
Software
2010
$2.7m
<50
Spanish Government Ministry
of Science & Education
Zerto
2009
$21.2m
<50
US Venture Partners, Battery
Ventures, Greylock Partners
Source: 451 Research
All of these startups have been covered in separate 451 Research reports. The VM
backup specialists (those with product lines designed only for virtual servers) include
Quest Software (publicly traded), Veeam Software and PHD Virtual Technologies.
Veeam is self-funded, with most of that funding coming from the sale of the Veeam
founders’ previous company, Aelita Software, to now archrival Quest Software for
$115m in 2004. Veeam executives have stated their plans for an IPO (although we do
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not expect that to happen within the next year), but Veeam could also be viewed as an
attractive acquisition target (see Section 4.5).
PHD Virtual Technologies was founded in 2005 and acquired for an undisclosed amount
by Insight Venture Partners in August 2008. In May 2010, Citrix invested an undisclosed
sum in PHD Virtual, with Insight Venture Partners making an additional investment
(also undisclosed). PHD Virtual received additional funding in 2011 from both Insight
Venture and Citrix. Insight Venture is now the majority investor in PHD, while Citrix is
a minority investor.
As mentioned previously, funding in the data-protection market so far has paled in
comparison to other sectors of the overall storage market. (For example, VC in the solidstate storage market is approaching $1bn.) However, we expect funding in data-protection startups to pick up in 2012 as the newer startups get out of the R&D and ‘prove it’
stages, and gain enough customer traction and revenue to warrant further investment.
4.3 M&A ACTIVITY
Similarly, there has been a relative paucity of M&A in the data-protection market over
the last couple of years, including the segment that specializes in virtual environments,
despite it being an extremely crowded market.
It’s interesting to note that the number of data-protection startups to emerge over the
past few years is greater than the number of data-protection vendors that have been
acquired. We attribute the high number of startups (entering a heavily crowded market)
to a number of factors, including:
• Rapid data growth and the trend toward virtualization are forcing companies to
rethink their backup/recovery strategies and, potentially, to switch vendors, which
presents opportunities for startups.
• The high cost and complexity of traditional backup/recovery software is also leading
companies to consider alternatives, including relatively unknown startups, despite
the ‘stickiness’ of backup applications.
However, we expect this trend to reverse over the next couple of years. In other words,
we expect to see more acquisitions than startups.
2010 was a blockbuster year for acquisitions in the overall storage market, setting
records in both the amount of cash laid out and the number of acquisitions.
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FIGURE 13: 2010 KEY STORAGE ACQUISITIONS
ACQUIRER
TARGET
DEAL AMOUNT
HP
3PAR
$2.4bn
EMC
Isilon
$2.36bn
Dell
Compellent
$960m
EMC
Greenplum
$400m (est.)
Vision Solutions
Double-Take Software
$242m
Emulex
ServerEngines
$160m (est.)
IBM
Storwize
$140m (est.)
Dell
Ocarina Networks
$125m (est.)
NetApp
Bycast
$80m
SolarWinds
Tek-Tools
$38m
PMC-Sierra
Adaptec
$34m
Source: 451 M&A KnowledgeBase
However, of those 11 deals, only one was clearly in the data-protection category (Vision
Solutions and Double-Take), and only two could be tangentially considered to be dataprotection deals (the IBM-Storwize and Dell-Ocarina data de-duplication/compression deals).
With the exception of a couple of huge acquisitions of disk-drive manufacturers, 2011 was
a relatively slow year for M&A activity in the storage market. Of the 11 notable acquisitions
in 2011, only three were clearly in the data-protection space (Quest-BakBone, QuantumPancetera and ASG-Atempo).
FIGURE 14: 2011 KEY STORAGE ACQUISITIONS
ACQUIRER
TARGET
DEAL AMOUNT
Western Digital
Hitachi GST
$4.25bn
Seagate Technology
Samsung Electronics
$1.375bn
Hitachi Data Systems
BlueArc
$600m (est.)
NetApp
LSI’s Engenio business unit
$480m
SanDisk
Pliant Technology
$327m
Fusion-io
IO Turbine
$95m
Allen Systems Group
Atempo
$65m (est.)
NetApp
Akorri
$60m
Quest Software
BakBone Software
$55m
Quantum
Pancetera Software
$12m
Oracle
Pillar Data Systems
Undisclosed amount
Source: 451 M&A KnowledgeBase
This year started out with a bang when Dell announced the acquisition of startup AppAssure
in February (for an undisclosed sum). We had tagged AppAssure as one of the more attractive acquisition candidates for some time, and designated Dell as a potential acquirer. Dell’s
acquisition of AppAssure gives it a solid play in the data-protection space, including cloud
storage and virtualization, but it does call into question Dell’s existing partnerships with
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CommVault and Symantec (although Dell officials stated that they would continue their
data-protection partnerships despite potential overlap between the AppAssure, CommVault
and Symantec product lines).
AppAssure had been experiencing rapid growth. At the time of Dell’s acquisition, the
five-year-old startup had more than 6,000 customers (double the 3,000 customers it had
one year ago) and 500 resellers (an increase of 226% vs. a year ago). Revenue increased
194% in 2011 vs. 2010, and company headcount is at 250, a 52% increase over the last
six months. AppAssure had been profitable since 2009, and received only one round of
funding ($6m from Bain Capital in 2008). The company does not reveal revenue figures,
but we estimate 2011 revenue in excess of $20m.
AppAssure’s data-protection software is a good fit for Dell because it combines a number
of functions in one product, including application-aware backup and recovery, continuous data protection, image-based backup, bare-metal restore, application-level recovery
(Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint), replication and DR, data de-duplication, compression, and WAN optimization. The software supports physical and virtual servers, including
VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer platforms. The latest release of AppAssure’s software included a number of cloud-related features, which will also be a good fit
with Dell’s overall cloud strategy.
Outside of the Dell-AppAssure acquisition, in the context of data protection for virtual
servers, we consider the most noteworthy acquisitions so far to be Quest Software’s acquisition of Vizioncore in 2008, Quest’s acquisition of BakBone Software in 2011, Vision Solutions buying Double-Take Software in 2010, and Quantum scooping up Pancetera in 2011.
Along with Veeam and PHD Virtual Technologies, Vizioncore was among the early
pioneers that developed backup/recovery software solely for virtual environments. Quest,
previously relatively unknown in the storage market (despite a number of storage-related
acquisitions, such as Aelita Software and Imceda Software), scooped up Vizioncore and
its popular vRanger suite of virtual server data-protection products in 2008 (Quest had
acquired a controlling interest in Vizioncore in 2005). The acquisition of Vizioncore gave
Quest a strong entry into the storage market and broadened the company’s portfolio of
virtual infrastructure optimization products. (Quest announced in mid-2010 that it would
jettison the Vizioncore brand.)
Quest doubled down on its bid to become a mainstream storage vendor in 2011 when it
completed its acquisition of BakBone and its NetVault suite of backup/recovery products
for an estimated $55m. The main gain in the BakBone acquisition was that it gave Quest
the ability to complement its virtual-only vRanger backup software with data protection
for physical servers. (BakBone’s NetVault supports both virtual and physical servers, but
was used primarily in physical server environments.)
Quest has no plans to fully integrate the former Vizioncore and BakBone products, but
is integrating – or cross-pollinating – key technologies. For example, in late 2011 it
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25
announced integration of BakBone’s NetVault SmartDisk de-duplication technology with
Quest’s vRanger software (which previously lacked de-duplication). Quest is expected to add
support for physical servers in the vRanger 6 release later this year. This will give Quest two
backup/recovery products that cover physical and virtual servers. At that point, the company
is expected to position the NetVault product line for enterprise customers (generally, more
than 1,000 employees) and vRanger for SMBs (less than 1,000).
Another interesting acquisition in the data-protection market was Vision Solutions’ $242m
acquisition of replication specialist Double-Take Software in 2010, which took the public
company private. (The acquisition value was actually closer to $153m because the profitable Double-Take had $89m in cash.) This deal was the only one in 2010 that was specifically
related to data protection. Prior to the acquisition, Vision Solutions was a reseller of DoubleTake’s software. (Vision is owned by Thoma Bravo, a private equity investor, in partnership
with internal management.)
Both companies had previously made storage-related acquisitions. Vision acquired high-availability specialist Lakeview Technology in 2007, and Double-Take had acquired emBoot (boot
from SAN), sanFly (iSCSI) and TimeSpring Software (continuous-data-protection software).
The acquisition of Double-Take gave Vision Solutions host-based replication software for
Windows, Linux, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s vSphere, taking the company’s platform range well beyond the IBM platforms that Vision specializes in. The acquisition also
made Vision a player in the market for virtual server data protection, but like all replication
vendors, it also put the company in direct competition with VMware, which also offers hostbased replication (vSphere Replication, which was introduced with vSphere 5 in 2011). Most of
the product enhancements in the Double-Take product line in 2011 were focused on VMware’s
vSphere and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. For example, Double-Take Availability now allows administrators to configure VM protection at the host level, eliminating the need to install software
on individual VMs. The company also added support for real-time replication-based protection of clustered Hyper-V hosts over WANs.
In the context of data protection for virtual servers, the other notable acquisition was Quantum’s purchase of Pancetera in 2011, although it was a relatively minor deal, at $12m ($8.4m
in cash and $3.6m in Quantum common stock). Pancetera’s technology was designed specifically to boost backup/recovery operations in virtual server environments (and was originally designed for Data Domain products). Quantum has already integrated the Pancetera
technology with its DXi line of data de-duplication appliances, and we expect integration of
Pancetera technology with Quantum’s StorNext file system later this year.
Pancetera, which was founded by veterans from Data Domain, received $5.3m in funding in
2009 and launched its first products in mid-2010. Quantum acquired the startup in mid-2011.
Pancetera’s technology augments data de-duplication by further reducing redundant data
in VMs. In addition, it provides a file-system view of the entire virtual environment, optimizes VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) images before the data goes over the wire, and sends the
‘scrubbed’ data to target backup devices (Quantum’s DXi de-duplication appliances). In late
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2011, Quantum introduced the first products to result from the Pancetera acquisition,
including the high-end DXi8500 de-duplication appliance and vmPRO software, both of
which incorporate Pancetera technology (which works only in VMware environments).
4.4 POTENTIAL ACQUIRERS
One reason why there hasn’t been more M&A action in the data-protection market
recently is that most – but not all – of the big vendors with deep pockets (e.g.,
Symantec, EMC, IBM, HP, CA Technologies) have large installed bases of their ‘legacy’
backup/recovery software. For those vendors, acquiring a backup vendor would cause
serious issues with product overlap, sales and support. On top of that, some of the large
players have already made a number of acquisitions to round out their data-protection portfolios. The best example of this is EMC, with its acquisitions of Data Domain,
Avamar, Bus-Tech, Kashya, Legato, Dantz and others. And in the context of data protection for virtual environments, the incumbent vendors believe they have caught up to or
surpassed the VM specialists (although that’s a much-debated topic).
Although it’s possible that one of the incumbents could make a play in this space, if we
rule out Symantec, EMC, IBM, HP, CA and Dell (which acquired AppAssure in February)
as potential acquirers, that leaves NetApp and Hitachi Data Systems. NetApp and HDS
currently rely primarily on reseller partnerships for backup and recovery. (HDS has a
partnership with CommVault, and NetApp has partnerships with CommVault and Syncsort.) Since the general trend in the IT vendor space is away from partnerships and
toward owning the IP, we consider NetApp and HDS to be potential acquirers. Oracle,
which added to its Sun storage arsenal with the acquisition of Pillar Data Systems in
2011, is another behemoth that may be eying the data-protection market.
Any forthcoming acquisitions in the backup/recovery market would, in all likelihood,
involve an acquirer that’s heavily invested in storage. However, acquirers could come
from outside the storage ranks. There are a few precedents for this, including SolarWinds’ acquisition of Tek-Tools for $38m in 2010 and, more recently, ASG Systems’
acquisition (for an undisclosed sum) of longtime backup specialist Atempo in late 2011.
4.5 POTENTIAL ACQUISITION TARGETS
Given that the hottest growth opportunity in the data-protection market is for virtual
server backup/recovery, vendors that specialize in that space could be viewed as attractive takeover candidates, particularly Veeam Software. A quick look at the company’s
growth figures explains why it could be a potential candidate for acquisition. Veeam
grew annual bookings 124% and new license bookings 116% in 2011 vs. 2010, and has
had over 100% annual growth since 2008. The startup has more than 28,000 customers
for its Veeam Backup & Replication software, has been adding more than 1,500 new
customers per month, and expects to exceed 60,000 by the end of 2012. Although the
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company was historically focused solely on VMware environments, it added support for
Microsoft’s Hyper-V at the end of 2011 (after a long delay), which should broaden the appeal
of its backup/replication software in multi-hypervisor shops.
Because of its growth trajectory and specialization in virtual server backup (the company
does not support physical server backup), Veeam would be an attractive target for companies that do not have their own backup IP (e.g., NetApp, HDS), as well as any vendor that has
weaknesses in its virtualization backup portfolio. However, in the latter scenario, the acquirer
would have a tough time positioning Veeam’s software relative to its existing backup/recovery
software because, again, virtually all of the traditional vendors claim that they have closed
the functionality gap with VM backup specialists such as Veeam (although that is not necessarily the case).
Veeam has stated its intention of going public (although we think that an IPO may be more
than a year away), but being acquired – as expensive as it may be for the acquirer – could be
a more likely eventuality. Although Veeam does not disclose revenue figures, we believe the
company exceeded $100m in 2011.
Although PHD Virtual Technologies – the other VM-only backup specialist – has not achieved
the success (in terms of customer count or revenue) that Veeam has, its expertise in data
protection for VMware and Citrix XenServer environments (and, perhaps later this year,
Hyper-V), as well as virtual desktop environments, might make it an attractive – and inexpensive – acquisition target. PHD Virtual receives about 60% of its revenue from VMware environments and 40% from Citrix environments, but the Citrix side of its business is growing
faster. As such, PHD’s success – and its likelihood of being acquired – depends somewhat on
growth in the Citrix market.
In late 2011, PHD received an additional round of financing (amount undisclosed) from
Citrix and Insight Venture Partners. (As mentioned earlier in this report, Citrix is a minority
investor in PHD Virtual, while Insight Venture Partners, which acquired PHD in 2008, is the
majority investor.) PHD Virtual’s growth rate has been solid, with its customer base increasing
from 3,300 in early 2011 to 4,250 today, a 29% increase. Of additional interest to potential
acquirers, the company has more than 300 channel partners, up from 200 one year ago.
Among publicly traded data-protection specialists, CommVault (which is strong in both
virtual and physical server backup) has been cited as a likely acquisition candidate for many
years. However, due to its success in growing revenue and profit, coupled with the acquisition speculation, CommVault’s market cap has skyrocketed (to more than $2bn), making
it an extremely expensive acquisition target. Dousing acquisition rumors somewhat, at a
ThinkEquity Annual Growth Conference in 2011, CommVault CEO Robert Hammer said that
the odds of his company being acquired were minimal. Hammer said that rather than courting
acquisitions, he planned to build the company up to $1bn in sales (although he declined to
put a time frame on that goal). Although we have downgraded CommVault from our mostlikely-to-be-acquired ranking, a blockbuster acquisition is still a possibility.
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Another M&A possibility is NetApp acquiring partner Syncsort. In the first year after
introducing NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB), the two companies closed more
than 100 deals – 50% of the NSB deals were net new deals for NetApp, and 20% of the
deals led to sales of NetApp systems as primary storage within six months. Syncsort is
now focused almost exclusively on the NetApp product, so a union would be a natural
(and relatively inexpensive) synergy.
Acronis is another vendor that we would single out as a potential takeover target.
Although still in the ‘other’ vendor category (i.e., with a relatively low market share),
Acronis ranks at the upper end with a rapidly growing installed base. The company
has more than 175,000 customers, has sold more than 2.5 million licenses and boasts
more than 25,000 channel partners worldwide. Acronis had revenue of $112.3m in 2009
and $125.3m in 2010 (at the time of this report, it had not yet released 2011 revenue
figures). Although once known primarily as a consumer market player, Acronis now
receives more than 80% of its revenue from the SMB and enterprise markets.
In 2011, the company combined file/image-based data protection and DR functionality in a single platform: Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.0, which supports all of the
major virtualization hypervisors. The company’s product line overlaps with software
from the traditional backup/recovery players (which could rule them out as potential
acquirers), but Acronis could be a surprise buy for vendors that do not have their own
backup/recovery IP. In addition to its flagship software (which supports both physical
and virtual servers), Acronis introduced VMware-specific software – vmProtect – late in
2011. The 10-year-old privately held company has been profitable since its early days.
In January, Alex Pinchev took on the CEO role at Acronis (he was previously with Red
Hat as president of global sales, services and field marketing), and former CEO Jason
Donahue departed the company.
(It should be noted that in February, Symantec filed complaints against both Acronis
and Veeam, alleging patent infringements relating to a number of technologies that
Symantec holds patents on.)
Other startups to keep an eye on from an acquisition-target perspective include Actifio
(which recently announced a collaboration partnership with IBM); Axcient (which grew
its revenue almost 400% in 2011 vs. 2010, and has a meet-in-the channel partnership
with HP); Cofio Software (founded by executives from BakBone, which was acquired
by Quest); Datto (which grew revenue 300% in 2011); VirtualSharp (which specializes
in recovery-as-a-service); and Zerto (which specializes in hypervisor-based replication).
Most of these startups are in the very early stages, but we think they have products that
are differentiated enough to warrant close tracking.
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4.6 VENDOR LANDSCAPE: RISE OF THE VM BACKUP, DR SPECIALISTS
Despite the early success of vendors such as Veeam and Quest, the vendor landscape in the
virtual server data-protection market is surprisingly similar to the landscape in the traditional
physical server backup world. The VM specialists are racking up impressive gains in customer
counts, but it’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the installed bases of the incumbent
backup vendors.
TheInfoPro recently surveyed midsize and large enterprises regarding their backup vendor
of choice in pure virtual environments. Symantec, which is the overall market-share leader
in backup, was cited most often (by 41% of the survey participants), followed by IBM and
EMC (see Figure 15). Since TheInfoPro study was focused on midsize ($100m-1bn in annual
revenue) and large enterprises (over $1bn), Symantec’s share is based mostly on its enterpriseclass NetBackup product, rather than its SMB-focused Backup Exec. IBM’s share was based
solely on Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), and EMC’s share represents a mix of its Avamar and
Networker product lines.
FIGURE 15: BACKUP VENDORS FOR VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Symantec
41%
IBM
24%
EMC
20%
NetApp
10%
CommVault
8%
Quest Sftw
6%
VMware
4%
HP
4%
CA
4%
Veeam Sftw
2%
Seagate
2%
Microsoft
2%
Innovation Data Processing
2%
Dell
2%
Source: TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research
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It’s interesting to note that NetApp, which doesn’t have backup software of its own,
showed up in this listing (cited by 10% of study participants). This underlines a key
trend in the market: the increasing use of hardware-based snapshots and replication as primary data-protection mechanisms, a trend that we discussed in Section 3.2.
Sometimes IT organizations use snapshots and replication in lieu of standard backup/
recovery software, although the more recent trend is to use snaps and replication in
conjunction with backup/recovery software.
It is important to bear in mind that TheInfoPro study covered only end-user companies with annual revenue in excess of $100m. In a survey of smaller companies, VM
backup specialists such as Veeam and Quest would show up with much higher share
percentages because SMBs are those companies’ primary target markets – although it
is interesting that both Quest (6%) and Veeam (2%) showed up in TheInfoPro survey of
large end-user companies.
Generally speaking, the VM backup specialists historically had advantages because
their code was written from scratch and tuned specifically for VM environments.
In addition, the VM backup specialists were able to more rapidly take advantage of
backup/recovery-enabling tools offered by the hypervisor vendors. As noted in Section
3.1, this situation has been changing – thanks in large part to new tools from hypervisor vendors such as VMware (e.g., VADP and CBT) that, to some degree, level the
playing field between traditional backup vendors and the VM specialists.
However, the VM backup specialists still have several key differentiators that, in some
situations, may be particularly beneficial to end users. For example, compared with
the more traditional backup vendors, Veeam points to its vPower-based ‘Instant VM
Recovery’ technology, which provides the ability to run a VM in production (or in
an isolated virtual lab) directly from a backup file (compressed and de-duplicated)
without extracting it from the backup file. Veeam claims that this reduces restore times
to a matter of minutes. A related differentiator is Veeam’s SureBackup Recovery Verification, which automatically verifies the recoverability of backups.
Similarly, compared with the traditional backup vendors, Quest differentiates with
the Active Block Mapping (ABM) feature in its vRanger backup software. ABM works
with VMware’s CBT, enables block-level incremental backups, and skips inactive and
deleted data in the backup process. Quest claims that this can reduce backup times by
up to 33%. Another performance-boosting feature in vRanger is parallel job execution,
which supports up to 59 concurrent streams per backup job.
Another key differentiator for the VM backup specialists (including Quest, Veeam and
PHD Virtual) vs. some of the incumbent backup vendors is the fact that replication is
tightly integrated – at no extra charge – with their backup software. One disadvantage
to using data-protection software from VM specialists such as Veeam and PHD Virtual
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is that they cannot protect physical servers. (Quest erased this disadvantage with its acquisition of BakBone Software because BakBone’s NetVault can be used in physical or virtual
environments.)
In addition to having technology-related advantages, another reason why the VM specialists were able to gain ground so quickly is that data-protection purchases at companies with virtual infrastructures were often made by the virtual server administrators, as
opposed to the storage specialists. This was particularly true at organizations that didn’t
have dedicated storage specialists. However, as companies move toward virtualizing
mission-critical applications, they may want to centralize data protection across physical and virtual infrastructures. A further advantage of consolidating data-protection tools
and procedures across both physical and virtual environments is that it makes it easier to
de-duplicate across both environments. The trend toward consolidating data-protection
products across physical and virtual servers could work in favor of the entrenched incumbent vendors that cover both physical and virtual environments.
In addition to the incumbent vendors with large installed bases, and VM backup/recovery/
replication specialists such as Quest, Veeam and PHD Virtual, traditional backup vendors
have shifted their R&D into the virtualization space and have competitive products. That
includes longtime data-protection specialists such as Acronis, Arkeia Software, Asigra,
FalconStor Software, InMage, Neverfail, SIOS Technology (with its acquisition of SteelEye
Technology), Syncsort and Vision Solutions.
Adding to the overcrowding, virtualization has in large part enabled the entry of a number
of startups into the data-protection market. Examples include AppAssure (acquired by Dell),
Actifio, Axcient, Cofio Software, CTERA Networks, Datto and others.
In the context of the vendor landscape for virtual server data protection, it’s important
to recognize hybrid cloud backup players. These vendors combine on-premises backup/
recovery software and appliances with replication to the cloud (either their own clouds or
third-party clouds). Since these vendors offer alternatives to existing backup software, and
have a strong focus on virtual environments, they should be added to the list of competitors crowding this market. Examples of hybrid cloud providers – which typically go to
market via the MSP and cloud provider route – include vendors such as Symantec (with its
appliances), Barracuda Networks, Axcient, CTERA, Datto, Zenith Infotech, CharTec, eFolder,
QuorumLabs, KineticD, Unitrends, Arkeia Software and others.
One of the key advantages of virtualization is that it enables low-cost and innovative
approaches to DR, and there are a number of additional young startups that are specifically
targeting this segment of the data-protection market, including Zerto, VirtualSharp and
Continuity Software.
Zerto (a play on ‘Zero RTO’) introduced hypervisor-based replication in mid-2011, positioning it against expensive array-based replication from vendors such as EMC, HDS, IBM
and NetApp. The company’s Zerto Virtual Replication software is priced at $800 per repli-
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cated VM and, further reducing costs, can replicate to dissimilar, inexpensive arrays. (This
is in contrast to array-based replication, which requires similar hardware on both ends.)
Zerto’s hypervisor-based software is integrated with VMware vCenter, and binds replication policies to VMs and Virtual Protection Groups. Zerto claims it can meet RPO requirements at the seconds level and RTO requirements at the minutes level, which more than
qualifies it for mission-critical applications. The startup is focused on large enterprises,
and does not plan to target SMBs, which helps the company avoid competition with
VMware’s hypervisor-based replication, as well as replication tools from Veeam, Quest
and PHD Virtual.
VirtualSharp is another young startup focused on DR for virtual environments with its
ReliableDR software (which also works in physical environments). The company is part of
a growing list of vendors offering or enabling cloud-based recovery as a service (or DR as
a service). ReliableDR runs as a virtual appliance, automates DR and provides DR certification (or assurance), which will become increasingly important as companies virtualize
mission-critical production applications. VirtualSharp’s software works only in VMware
environments, although a version for Hyper-V is expected later this year.
Continuity Software is another startup focused on disaster recovery, with a particular
focus on DR testing and eliminating the ‘gaps’ between primary and secondary sites that
arise from causes such as configuration drift.
One final point on the vendor landscape: Although VMware partners tightly with most
data-protection vendors, and is by all accounts doing a great job of providing enabling
technologies for those vendors, it is increasingly becoming a competitor with many of
them. VMware has a wide array of products for all aspects of data protection, including
VMware Fault Tolerance, High Availability, Storage vMotion, Site Recovery Manager
(SRM) for DR and DR testing, VMware Data Recovery (VDR) for backup/recovery, and
vSphere Replication for host-based replication.
Introduced in late 2011 with the launch of vSphere 5.0, vSphere Replication is the newest
addition to VMware’s data-protection portfolio. It is included in VMware’s SRM, and
provides host/hypervisor-based replication. Although VMware does not position vSphere
Replication as competing with high-performance array-based replication, it does offer
a lower-cost alternative to array-based replication. In addition, vSphere Replication
competes directly with other host-based replication products, such as those from Vision
Solutions (Double-Take product line) and Neverfail Group. Furthermore, vSphere Replication provides an alternative to the replication modules that the VM specialists have integrated into their backup/recovery products, including Veeam, Quest and PHD Virtual.
One often overlooked arrow in VMware’s quiver is VDR, which was introduced with
vSphere 4.0 in 2009. Implemented as a VM appliance and integrated with vCenter Server,
VDR is VMware’s backup/recovery product. To some degree, VDR competes with all other
backup/recovery products (although VMware positions it as being complementary to
third-party backup software).
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In small SMB environments or remote offices, VDR is sometimes used as the sole backup
product, but it is most often used in conjunction with third-party backup software. One
reason why VDR is widely deployed is that, in licensed versions of VMware’s hypervisor, it’s
free. VDR leverages VADP and CBT (see Section 3.1), and includes data de-duplication.
VMware claims that VDR, which is implemented as a virtual appliance with up to 2TB per
appliance, can scale to about 1,000 VMs, although it is rarely deployed in environments of
that size. Each VDR virtual appliance can back up as many as 100 VMs, and users can add
appliances (up to 10) to protect as many as 1,000 VMs. However, the appliances are not aware
of each other (i.e., they do not share information about backup jobs), so from a management
perspective, users have to know which VMs are being backed up by which appliances, which
can lead to management issues in environments with a large numbers of VMs.
We believe that VMware will continue to improve the functionality of all of its data-protection products, and that the company will increasingly compete with its partners in the areas
of fault tolerance, HA, replication and backup/recovery. In the context of VDR and backup/
recovery, the scenario is similar to Microsoft and its Data Protection Manager.
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SECTION 5
Evaluation Criteria
The functionality differences between various vendors’ backup/recovery applications
are fading, as technologies such as VADP and CBT have to a degree enabled the traditional backup vendors to ‘catch up’ to the functionality offered by the VM backup
specialists. But a number of factors still lead to confusion in this market. First, it’s an
extremely crowded market with a wide array of vendors – both startups and established incumbents. Second, virtually all vendors claim that their software is faster (for
backup and restore), more efficient, easier to use, less expensive, etc.
End users should first determine what their requirements are; just because a vendor
has a particular feature doesn’t mean you need that feature. The best place to start is
to determine your goals. For example, do you need full image-level backups? Baremetal (system-level) restore? File-level backup/restore? Object-level restores? Application awareness and consistency? Local or remote restore? Granular restore? Continuous data protection)? Virtual-to-physical (V2P) and/or physical to virtual (P2V)
backup/restore? Integrated replication? Continuous access to files during differential backups? In short, many of the feature-level evaluation criteria are the same for
virtual environments as they are for physical environments.
Next, determine the expected frequency of backup, which is directly related to your
RPO. Also, determine how much performance you’ll need, which is directly related to
the size of your backup window and your RTO. Closely related to RPO and RTO are
SLAs, which are more stringent with mission-critical applications. Finally, if your VM
administrators will be handling backup/restore operations, determine how easy to use
the software is and how tightly integrated it is with the vCenter management console.
Another factor to consider is whether you want/need to use the same software to
back up your physical servers and virtual servers. Most vendors provide protection for
both, but some – such as Veeam and PHD Virtual Technologies – are focused solely on
virtual servers.
Support for multiple hypervisors is becoming increasingly important. All backup
vendors support VMware ESX/ESXi/vSphere platforms; most vendors support Microsoft’s Hyper-V (although functionality is typically not on par with support for
VMware); many vendors support Citrix XenServer; but support for hypervisors with
lower market shares is rare.
In talking to end users, we find that their shortlist of evaluation criteria often boils
down to performance (speed at which backups and restores occur), ease-of-use and
cost. Of course, ease-of-use and low cost are always key criteria, but they are even
more important in virtual environments. Low cost is paramount because reducing
costs is the key reason why most IT organizations virtualize in the first place. (And
low cost is one of the key differentiators of the VM backup specialists, although
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it should be noted that the more traditional vendors are more willing than usual to
discount in this market in order to protect their installed bases). And ease-of-use is
particularly important in virtual server environments because, as we have noted, it is
often the VM administrator – rather than a storage specialist – that is in charge of data
protection. (Again, this is another reason why the VM backup specialists, unencumbered
with legacy code, were able to quickly gain a beachhead in this market.)
The case studies in the following section provide more information on what evaluation
criteria are most important to IT professionals, and serve to illustrate some of the key
themes of this report.
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SECTION 6
Case Studies
6.1 BANK USES DIFFERENT SOFTWARE TO PROTECT VIRTUAL AND
PHYSICAL SERVERS
As mentioned previously, one of the most fundamental decisions that end users need to make
in the context of protecting virtual environments is whether to try to manage both physical
and virtual servers with software from the same vendor, or to use different software for the
separate environments – an approach sometimes referred to as ‘best of breed.’ Cornerstone
Community Bank, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is a good example of a company that opted for
the best-of-breed approach.
Cornerstone Community Bank’s IT infrastructure includes 31 Windows and Linux servers, 25
of which are virtualized. The bank also has three ESX hosts at its primary datacenter and two
ESX hosts at a secondary site for backup and disaster recovery. Key mission-critical applications include Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle databases, and the bank’s total disk
capacity is about 4.5TB (most of which is on EMC arrays in a VCE infrastructure).
On the physical server side of its operation, Cornerstone relies on Symantec’s Backup Exec
software, and on the virtual server infrastructure, it relies primarily on Quest’s vRanger software (although the bank uses Backup Exec in some parts of its virtual environment for an
added layer of data protection and for long-term retention requirements).
Prior to installing vRanger, Cornerstone was also relying on third-party replication software (Double-Take). However, the bank was experiencing problems around replication reliability and performance. The IT department (which consists of only two full-time employees,
including vice president and IT officer Randy Dover) began searching for alternatives that
would improve backup, restore and replication in its virtual environments. Cornerstone opted
for Quest’s vRanger software for a number of reasons, including performance, cost and –
perhaps most importantly – its built-in replication.
With the bank’s previous replication tool, VMs were sometimes ‘lost’ at the secondary site, in
which case the replication software would start replicating from scratch, which led to unacceptable performance. For example, replicating a 400GB VM could take as long as 90 hours.
Using Quest’s vReplicator (which is now integrated with vRanger), the bank was able to cut
replication times by 67% (30 hours vs. 90 hours), and has not experienced any ‘lost’ VMs in
the replication process.
Although Cornerstone did consider disk array-based replication, at the time the EMC CX300
array at its disaster recovery site did not support array-based replication, and upgrading to a
new array would have been prohibitively expensive (around $75,000). Leveraging the builtin replication in vRanger proved to be a far less expensive approach that still met the bank’s
replication reliability and performance requirements.
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Prior to switching to vRanger (about two years ago), Cornerstone Community Bank was also
experiencing problems with backup/restore in its virtual environment, in part because it was
treating VMs as though they were physical servers. The company would do flat file backups
on its virtual servers, and back those up to tape every night. In the case of losing a VM
during the backup process, it required long and cumbersome restores that involved building
a new VM from scratch, installing Windows and the backup agents, finding the right tape
with the backup of the server they needed to restore, and then doing a flat file restore from
tape. Using this methodology, restores were measured in hours or days, according to Dover.
With vRanger, restores are measured in minutes. In one particular operation, Dover was able
to restore a 32GB server in six minutes and 18 seconds. He estimates that the same operation
would have taken 20-25 hours with his previous restore process.
VRanger’s backup/restore/replication performance is in part due to its Active Block Mapping
technology, which Quest sees as one of its key differentiators vs. traditional competitors.
Active Block Mapping leverages VMware’s Changed Block Tracking (CBT) and reads only
active blocks from an image, skipping inactive and deleted data, which increases performance and capacity utilization.
Quest also attributes vRanger’s performance to its parallel job execution, which can handle
up to 59 concurrent streams associated with one VM backup. In addition, the software can
back up 20 VMs simultaneously. Dover also applauds vRanger’s file-level restore (FLR)
feature, which allows administrators to restore a file in less than five minutes.
Although traditional backup vendors argue that using separate products for virtual and physical servers adds complexity and management challenges, Dover says that the benefits far
outweigh those potential drawbacks, and that vRanger was relatively easy to deploy and use.
6.2 MEDICAL CENTER STANDARDIZES ON ONE BACKUP APP FOR
CENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT
Although some IT organizations prefer to use separate backup applications in their virtual
and physical environments (see previous case study), others prefer to use one backup application for both environments in order to gain the benefits of centralized management. That
was the case with Maine Medical Center (MMC), in Portland, Maine, which uses Symantec’s
NetBackup (and a variety of other Symantec tools) to protect an infrastructure that is about
50% virtualized.
In Section 3.1, we detailed the benefits of vendors and users leveraging hypervisor tools
and APIs such as VMware’s VADP and CBT. Maine Medical Center provided a good example
of that trend when it upgraded to Symantec’s NetBackup 7, which was the first release of
NetBackup to fully leverage VADP and CBT.
According to Joe Donahue, MMC’s storage and backup administrator, one of the key advantages of leveraging VADP and CBT in NetBackup 7 and VMware’s vSphere 4 was a significant improvement in backup/restore performance. For example, MMC reduced backup times
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© 2012 451 RESEARCH, LLC AND/OR ITS AFFILIATES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
by as much as 10X in an environment with 256 VMs and 150TB of data. And recovery times
decreased 5X, from 10 hours to 2 hours. (MMC protects file servers as well as mission-critical
applications such as SQL Server, Oracle databases and a number of medical-specific applications. Its disk array infrastructure includes EMC Symmetrix DMX-3, Clariion, Celerra and
Centera systems.)
Leveraging VMware’s vStorage APIs (VADP and CBT) enabled MMC to eliminate the need to
run backup tasks within each VM, and also eliminated the need to do intermediary backups
to a proxy server, which previously took 10 minutes per VM. Prior to deploying NetBackup
7, MMC relied on VMware’s VCB for backups, which required a proxy server intermediary for
VM backup copies.
In addition to VADP and CBT, Donahue attributes the performance increases to a migration from a largely tape-based backup infrastructure to a disk-based backup infrastructure
(although MMC still uses tape-based backup for legal documents). The performance boosts
were also attributable to NetBackup’s PureDisk de-duplication, which reduced MMC’s backup
data load by 90% (from 152TB to 16TB), according to Donahue, who estimates that that data
reduction saved about $320,000 worth of disk capacity.
Overall, MMC reduced its RTO and RPO from several weeks to two hours, and slashed
recovery administration time by 80% (from 10 hours per week to 2 hours per week, while
improving restore times by 2X to 5X).
For a brief period during its virtualization process, MMC used Veeam Backup & Replication software in its virtual environment. Donahue says that the VM-specific backup software
worked well, but that the main reason they decided to standardize on NetBackup was to get
unified backup/recovery management across both the physical and virtual infrastructures. In
addition, the VM administration team wanted central IT to take over the backup tasks in the
virtual server environment.
Going beyond backup and restore, MMC deployed a high-availability business continuity
implementation with Symantec’s Veritas Cluster Server and Veritas Storage Foundation HA
in conjunction with NetBackup. Rounding out its Symantec portfolio, MMC uses Enterprise Vault for archiving which, because of its data de-duplication and compression, reduced
primary storage utilization from almost 100% to 21% and allowed MMC to avoid purchasing
$30,000 of additional disk capacity.
For its disaster recovery operations, MMC relies on a combination of EMC array-based replication and NetBackup’s built-in replication, using hardware-based replication for metadata
and catalog data, and software-based replication for the actual backup data. MMC plans to
upgrade to the Automated Image Replication (AIR) technology in NetBackup 7.1.
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© 2012 451 RESEARCH, LLC AND/OR ITS AFFILIATES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
39
6.3 TOP DATA-PROTECTION CRITERION FOR HEALTHCARE
PROVIDER: ULTRA-FAST RESTORES
Particularly in virtual server environments, rapid restores are often far more important that speedy backups. That was the case with MCMC LLC, a healthcare organization
headquartered in Boston.
MCMC embarked on its virtualization project in 2007, and is now almost 100% virtualized in a VMware vSphere infrastructure, which includes mission-critical applications
such as Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server and file, web and email servers. (The
only application that has not been virtualized is MySQL.) The IT team manages more
than 150 virtual machines, and supports about 1,000 users.
When the managed care organization began its virtualization initiative, it was relying
on ‘legacy’ backup software and a data-protection environment based mostly on tape
backups. Experiencing reliability and performance issues with the tape-based infrastructure, MCMC decided that it needed to migrate to a disk-based backup/recovery approach
in conjunction with backup software that was designed specifically for VMware environments. The organization’s primary evaluation criterion was ultra-fast restore performance, both at the VM and file level, but ease-of-use and integrated replication also
came into play.
MCMC chose Veeam Backup & Replication image-based backup/recovery software,
which includes what Veeam refers to as ‘Instant VM Recovery’ and ‘Instant File-Level
Recovery.’ (Although many backup vendors claim ‘instant’ restores, best-case recovery
times are typically measured in minutes.) Instant VM Recovery allows administrators to
restore a VM directly from a compressed and de-duplicated backup.
Prior to implementing Veeam Backup & Replication, VM restores typically took well
over an hour at MCMC; now they can be accomplished in minutes, with only a few
clicks, according to Ben Sheets, MCMC’s VMware and Microsoft Administrator. The
increase in file-level restore performance was even more significant. With Veeam’s
Instant File-Level Recovery, file restores take minutes. That compares to 24-36 hours
with MCMC’s previous tape-based backup/recovery software.
MCMC plans to upgrade to the 6.0 version of Veeam Backup & Recovery, which incorporates one-click recovery for both VMs and files. Sheets expects the one-click recovery
to reduce restore times to a matter of seconds.
Because of the healthcare organization’s regulatory mandates (HIPPA and Homeland
Security), another feature of Veeam’s software that proved critical is its SureBackup
functionality, which provides automatic verification of the recoverability of backups.
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© 2012 451 RESEARCH, LLC AND/OR ITS AFFILIATES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
SECTION 7
Recommendations
As companies begin or extend the virtualization of mission-critical applications, it’s a
perfect time to rethink – and maybe even re-architect – data-protection strategies and
implementations. That does not necessarily mean switching backup vendors; within any
given vendor’s backup portfolio there are many ways to optimize the backup/recovery
procedures to meet a company’s particular requirements.
Questions to ask include: Are you meeting your RPO, RTO – and perhaps most importantly – SLA requirements? Are your backup windows acceptable? Are your backup/
recovery operations leading to bottlenecks in your production VM environment or
network? Is your existing backup software/hardware providing adequate data de-duplication ratios and performance?
If you’re falling short in any of those areas, it’s time to rethink your backup strategy.
And particularly in the context of virtualizing mission-critical applications, you have to
be proactive about data protection. Unless you fine-tune your data-protection policies
and procedures before you virtualize your mission-critical applications, backup may be
a factor in derailing – or at least stalling – your virtualization initiative.
As part of the reevaluation process, users will have to address the issue of how many
different backup/recovery products – and vendors – they need. IT administrators
constantly tell us that they want to simplify their backup operations and minimize the
number of products/vendors they rely on. We agree that this should be a primary goal.
However, it’s sometime beneficial to choose best-of-breed products to meet particular
requirements. We’ve seen this repeatedly in IT organizations with mixed physical and
virtual infrastructures, where they continue to use their existing products/vendors in
the physical realm, while deploying VM-specific software in their virtual-only environments. In many cases this is an acceptable approach, but we think the general trend will
be toward consolidation of data-protection products.
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41
INDEX OF COMPANIES
3PAR
Benchmark Capital
24
Acronis
12 , 29, 32
Actifio
BlueArc
22 , 29, 32
Adaptec
Bycast
Aelita Software
22 , 25
Airtek Capital Group
Akorri
CA
22
24
22
24, 27
AppAssure Software
22 , 24, 25, 27,
12 , 27, 30
12 , 27
CharTec
Allen Systems Group
27
CA Technologies
24
Allegis Capital
24
Bus-Tech
24
22
32
Cisco
22
Citrix
14, 22 , 23, 25, 28, 35
Cofio Software
22 , 29, 32
32
Arkeia Software
Asigra
16 , 32
24, 27
Avamar
8, 12 , 27, 30
Compellent
24
Axcient
22 , 29, 32
Cornerstone Community Bank
CTERA Networks
BakBone Software
37,
38
Bain Capital Ventures
22 , 25
24, 25, 26 , 29, 32
Barracuda Networks
42 12 , 16 , 25, 27, 28, 30
Continuity Software 9, 22, 32, 33
Atempo
Battery Ventures
CommVault
32
22
32
Dantz
27
Data Domain
Datto
Dell
22 , 32
8, 26 , 27
29, 32
15, 22 , 24, 25, 27, 30, 32
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© 2012 451 RESEARCH, LLC AND/OR ITS AFFILIATES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Double-Take Software 9, 24, 25, 26,
33, 37
Druva Software
Isilon
32
emBoot
26
26
27
LSI
24
32
Maine Medical Center
38
24
Giza Venture Capital
Greenplum
22
NetApp
22
24, 27
15, 16 , 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32
Neverfail Group 9, 32, 33
Nexus Venture Partners
24
8, 12 , 15, 24, 27, 29, 30
Ocarina Networks
22
24
Oracle 5, 14, 24, 27, 37, 39
25
Indian Angel Network Services
22
32
Insight Venture Partners
22
North Bridge Venture Partners
8, 12 , 15, 24, 26 , 27, 29, 30, 32
Imceda Software
40
Microsoft 5, 14, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, 35,
37, 40
Hitachi Data Systems
Hitachi GST
MCMC LLC
24
Greylock Partners
InMage
22 , 32
Lakeview Technology
Legato
Fusion-io
IBM
27
24
FalconStor Software
HP
24
KineticD
8, 12 , 15, 24, 27, 30, 32 , 37, 39
Emulex
24
22
Kashya
eFolder
EMC
IO Turbine
22 , 23, 28
451 RESEARCH: INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Pancetera Software
24, 25, 26 , 27
Peninsula Ventures
22
PHD Virtual Technologies
25, 28, 31, 32 , 33, 35
© 2012 451 RESEARCH, LLC AND/OR ITS AFFILIATES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
2 , 22 , 23,
43
Pillar Data Systems
Pliant Technology
PMC-Sierra
24, 27
Syncsort
Tek-Tools
24
24, 25, 26 , 27
Quest Software 2, 12, 22, 24, 25, 26,
29, 30, 31, 32 , 33, 37, 38
Red Hat
22
TimeSpring Software
Unitrends
26
32
US Venture Partners
22 , 32
22
Veeam Software 2, 12, 22, 23, 25, 27,
28, 29, 30, 31, 32 , 33, 35, 39, 40
29
Samsung Electronics
SanDisk
24, 27
Thomvest Ventures
24
Quantum Corp
QuorumLabs
16 , 27, 29, 32
Venrock Associates
24
22
VirtualSharp Software 9, 22, 29, 32,
24
33
sanFly
26
Vision Solutions 9, 24, 25, 26, 32, 33
Scale Venture Partners
Seagate Technology
Sequoia Capital
ServerEngines
24, 30
25
VMware I, 2, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 16 , 25, 26 , 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33,
34, 35, 38, 39, 40
24
Western Digital
32
Zenith
24, 27
SteelEye Technology
Storwize
Vizioncore
22
SIOS Technology
SolarWinds
22
32
Zenith Infotech
32
24
32
Zerto 9, 22, 29, 32, 33
24
Symantec 8, 9, 12, 16, 25, 27, 29, 30,
32 , 37, 38, 39
44 BACKUP IN A VIRTUAL WORLD
© 2012 451 RESEARCH, LLC AND/OR ITS AFFILIATES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.