80% of Respondents Consider to Deploy Backup Server as Virtual Appliance

Arkeia Software announced results of its survey of VMware users that indicate their current data protection practices and future requirements.

The survey was conducted at VMworld 2012 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco August 26-29.

Survey Results
An obvious shift in interest and acceptance of virtual backup was revealed, as 80% reported they are considering deployment of a backup server as a virtual appliance. Because backup servers are lightly used outside of the primary backup window, most backup servers can participate in the trend toward server consolidation.

At an event dedicated to virtualization and the cloud, 63% of VMworld respondents still need to protect both physical and VMs. Other surveys conducted by Arkeia and others have shown that still larger fractions of mid-market IT shops continue to deploy at least some physical servers, requiring that their backup solution be able to protect both virtual and physical environments.

Two key survey findings were:

• 80% are considering deployment of a backup server as a virtual appliance.
• 63% need to protect both physical and virtual servers.

Bringing the Benefits of Virtualization to Backup
"We transitioned from Arkeia Network Backup software to the Arkeia vmOneStep virtual backup appliance to gain the benefits of server consolidation," said Tom Indelli, systems administrator at the University of Chicago. "The transition from software to a virtual appliance was simple. I did not have to modify the agents on our physical machines and Arkeia can backup VMs with only the agent bundled in the vmOneStep appliance."  

"Administrators that deploy backup servers as virtual appliances fully reap the benefits of virtualization, including cost reduction, ease of provisioning, and availability," said Bill Evans, CEO at Arkeia Software. "Having first delivered a backup server as a VMware-compatible virtual appliance in 2008, Arkeia has witnessed steady growth in adoption of virtual appliances for backup. At VMworld 2012, we demonstrated the speed of provisioning of our vmOneStep virtual appliance by demonstrating that takes just 5 minutes to download the appliance from the web, deploy the appliance on a VMware ESXi hypervisor, and begin a backup of multiple VMs. We believe that the deployment of backup servers as virtual appliances is the natural outcome of the industry’s inexorable adoption of virtualization."