IT and data center managers are starting to envision the benefits of virtual environments. The widespread interest in virtualization today has companies that are intent on cashing in on the advantages of virtualization technologies eager to reduce the financial and physical footprint associated with racks of computers.

While many elements of the IT environment are relatively unchanged by virtualization, there are some new considerations for IT. For example, organizations with expanding virtual infrastructures should plan to protect their virtual resources with a strategy similar to the one they use for physical resources. Challenged with meeting recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), even as backup windows and storage space shrink, organizations must be able to quickly back up their virtual environments and recover not just an entire virtual machine but individual files on that machine.

To that end, a growing number of companies are opting for advanced technologies that address new virtual environments. Organizations need an efficient and flexible approach to protecting virtual environments that dramatically reduces server, network, and storage requirements for data protection while providing significant improvement in recovery time and reliability.

Better Backups, Better Recovery
With off-host backups of virtual machines now possible, the impact of backup processing on the server and hosted virtual machines is significantly reduced, allowing for more frequent backups.

Yet, traditional backup solutions force users to choose image or file and don’t provide the capability to back up the entire virtual machine without conducting two separate backups. Recognizing the benefits of being able to perform either type of restore, organizations prefer to have ultimate restore options when things go wrong.

For example, if a virtual machine is infected with a virus or inadvertently damaged due to user error, a single file restore is of little use; the entire virtual machine needs to be restored. However, if the user deletes and needs to recover a single file – the most common type of restore operation – restoring the entire virtual machine is not only excessive but also requires downtime.