5 Questions I Ask Every Customer about their VMware Backup Strategy

 VMware Backup Strategy

I can’t remember of a technology platform that provided better APIs than VMware’s VADP API framework. While it has had annoying bugs periodically, overall the APIs made it extremely simple, easy, and efficient for VMware VM backups.

It’s no wonder, there are a huge amount of backup product vendors that all claim features like application consistent and incremental forever backup (using VMware Change Block Tracking (CBT)) and instant recovery of VMs. There really is very little competitive differences now between these products! All 25+ vendors are all calling the same library for CBT capture.

But what really matters in terms of costs and RTO is where and how you store that backup data and metadata. In this cloud era, it’s hard not to consider the cloud as a target to store backups and reduce data center footprint and costs for backup and DR.

Here are 5 simple questions I ask all of my current and prospective customers to think about when thinking about their VMware backup strategy.


1. Why have local on-premises backup copies? Why not back it up directly to the Cloud?

Not all data is born equal.

Multiple studies have shown that it’s important to tier your VMs and then apply backup and retention policies. So for all the Tier-2 VMs, which typically constitute anywhere between 40% to 70%, what if you could eliminate the local copy and backup directly to cloud object storage like AWS S3, S3IA, Azure Blob, Google Nearline, IBM COS?

They all offer 11 x 9s of durability in three availability zones. It costs less. There is no capacity management as you don’t have to scramble for storage when you add the next 100 Tier-2 VMs for backups. There is zero operational burden's with this approach.

Obviously, this is not an ‘all or none’ approach. For your Tier-1 VMs, you might still have a requirement or bandwidth constraint so you can choose to have a local cache/backup copy in your data center, and also have a second backup copy in such a cloud object storage.



2. How long are your restores taking today?

Is that acceptable as your data grows…

Obviously, if you like the approach of leveraging cloud object storage, your next thought would be “What about the recovery time objective (RTO)?”

Most backup products, unfortunately, take a long time to recover from their deduplicated backups stored in cloud object storage. The catch cry for some reason is still around the “backup industry”, but I’ve been calling out that the priority is wrong, it should be called a “recovery industry”. We backup so we can recover! That is what a business is really after when it invests in a backup solution, and more often they can’t afford to wait days and hours to get their critical data back from a dedup engine or tape.

Object storage can really help solve two pain points there, it’s infinite in scale, and yet very quick to mount the data back. Couple it with a next-generation backup product that writes the data in its native application format, and you’re starting to fix a lot of the legacy issues from a backup mindset, versus a recovery mindset! Recovering that 10TB VM or SQL/Oracle Database is just a few minutes away now, It’s a game changer people… seriously!



3. If you are restoring VMs from the cloud, are you concerned about the egress costs?

Optimize every bit that moves. One of the concerns enterprises express is the egress charges from the cloud back to on-premises. Let’s explore, with an example, of how much would it cost you on a monthly basis.

Let’s assume you have 1000 VMs that are being protected. Let’s assume, on an average 20 restore jobs for files/folders are performed per week, i.e. 80 restore jobs a month. Assume that on an average 100 MB of files are restored in each job. This translates to 80 x 100 MB = 8GB of total data restored from the cloud.

Assuming you use AWS S3 IAS (Infrequent Access Storage), it charges $0.01 per GB. The data retrieval charges = $0.08 per month. AWS also charges for the data that leaves AWS cloud at a rate of $0.09 per GB. This translates to $0.72 per month. Thus total costs = $0.08+$0.72 = $0.80 per month, which obviously is very low.

Now let’s look at a scenario where 20 VMs are recovered from cloud object storage back to on-premises. Assume average VM size = 200GB. Thus total data transferred = 20 x 200GB = 4,000 GB. Thus total data transfer charges = ($0.01+$0.09)*4000GB = $400 for the entire month.

The good news is that even this small monetary amount can be reduced further. Consider a next-generation approach, where not all data needs to be recovered if it’s already on-premises. Features like “delta block differencing” technology will lookup its metadata to compare which blocks already exist in the local backup cache on-premises and transfer only those blocks from the cloud which don’t already exist on-premises. So in the above example, if you assume 40% of the blocks already exist on-premises, only 2,400 GB will be copied from the cloud, thus reducing the data transfer costs to $240.



4. Do you require any data immutability capability at the software and cloud storage layer?

Was it a fat-finger or a rogue internal user?

One of the legit concerns enterprises have is that of a rogue or malicious user who could potentially delete backups.

What if at the software layer, an admin can apply a data immutability lock on backups of specific VMs. Once this is applied, even an admin can not expire or purge the backups for those specific VMs.

You can still manage the TCO for disk by setting an expiration date for the backup data, as per the original required policy, or elect to never expire it, yet not be concerned about a rogue admin or a fat finger.



5. Do you like buying hardware appliances? Why not software only, or a SaaS platform?

“The world we have created is a process of our thinking. It can not be changed without changing our thinking.” — Einstein

Many enterprises are getting used to “as-a-Service” consumption model with exposure to GSuite, Office 365, Salesforce, Github, AWS RDS & Redshift and the likes of VMware Cloud in AWS.

So they are also questioning the idea of purchasing hardware appliances for everything, not only backup appliances but also minimizing their production compute platforms too. Why not consider a VMware Backup SaaS platform? Why not consume VMware backup and recovery to cloud in a simple per VM subscription pricing model?

In my earlier days at Actifio, we only sold a hardware solution, and many customers pushed back, asking for a software appliance version. We responded to those customers and launched Sky into the marketplace, and it’s been very successful to say the least. But we’re now going one step further and offering a SaaS version for VMware backup to AWS/Azure/Google/IBM cloud. Check out more details here at ActifioGo.com. The only consideration to factor in is some good bandwidth to your local cloud and you can be off and running in a few minutes.


Every few years, technology advances enable new capabilities which enable us to question some of the existing practices/assumptions and adjust appropriately. Examples like API-driven IaaS and PaaS were deemed too complex and resource intensive to automate. But the IT world has shifted, and enterprises are all looking at the benefits of cost optimization, automation, and orchestration across their entire stack. I’d highly recommend you consider asking yourself the 5 questions above, and see how you can benefit from the likes of a next-generation platform combined with object storage, with 11 x 9s of durability, almost infinite capacity, and pay-as-you-grow models, which simplifies your life and lets you focus on other important tasks.


Check out this short 3-minute video by my good mate Chandra Reddy which compares architectures to leverage cloud object storage effectively. It’s well worth the time.

How to Develop a Holistic Cloud Data Management Strategy –


Actifio Briefing Note

Many organizations have identified the public cloud as an important tool in their data protection and data management strategies. Vendors are quick to jump on this interest. The problem is most of the solutions vendors provide are fairly myopic and only use a part of the cloud capabilities in their solutions. IT needs to look for a solution that enables a more holistic use of the public cloud.

A Public Cloud Capability Inventory

Most organizations, as they start their cloud journey, look at the cloud as a giant digital dumping ground. They store backups and maybe even archive data to one type of cloud storage at one provider. This dumping ground use case ignores the fact that there are multiple cloud providers, each with different types of storage tiers and, of course, there is a vast amount of processing resources available to act on the data they move to the cloud. Also, different cloud providers are developing expertise in certain areas, some are better at video and audio processing, others at machine learning and analytics, other still are known for airtight security.

To tap into this inventory of capabilities IT needs to equip the organization with tools that allow for not only the movement of data to and between clouds, but also the ability to move data in its native form and in some cases, even transform that data so it is ready to run in the destination cloud.

Data Protection is Just a Starting Point

There is a reason data protection is the number one task organizations use to begin their cloud journey. Cloud backup, and especially disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), simplify most difficult to manage processes in the data center. And data protection should continue to be the first step, but IT needs to be careful the solution isn’t so myopic that as the organization looks for other cloud use cases it can’t leverage the data protection process to enable them.

DRaaS is certainly a step in the right direction. It expands the cloud backup use case by enabling a customer’s virtual machines (VM) to run in a provider’s cloud in the event of a disaster. In this case, the cloud is used for more than just storage. These solutions leverage cloud compute to instantiate those VMs.

To be more than just data protection, the solution has to provide several key capabilities. First, it has to, obviously, support multiple cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Azure and others. It also has to support private cloud storage (object storage).

Second, the solution needs to move data in its native format, not a proprietary backup format. Storing data in a backup format means time is required to move the data out of the format into another format.

Third, the solution needs to be cloud-tier aware. Each of the major cloud providers has at least three tiers of storage; a high performance but expensive tier, a more affordable but less performing middle tier, and a cold tier that is cost effective but slow to retrieve data from. IT needs the flexibility to use more than one tier depending on the use case. The solution should enable them to quickly move data between tiers based that need.

Finally, the solution needs to be multi-cloud aware. The ability to move data between clouds is becoming increasingly important. It enables the organization to leverage specific capabilities of a particular cloud provider or to provide redundancy against cloud failure.

Introducing Actifio 8.0

Actifio is a software-based solution that provides enterprise data-as-a-service. It enables the instant use of data across data centers and multiple clouds. It also enables near real-time protection of data, tracking all those changes, to provide near-instant rollback from cyber-attacks or disasters. Finally, it eliminates the uncontrolled proliferation of copy data by creating what it calls a “Virtual Data Pipeline.”

It works by installing a virtual or physical appliance on-premises and after the initial copy of data is created, new writes are split as data is sent to primary storage. Essentially, the primary copy is updated incrementally forever. The Actifio Virtual Data Pipeline then manages this copy of data and provides read/write virtual copies of data to various processes like analytics, test-dev and DR.

In its 8.0 release, Actifio raises the bar. First, it provides native, multi-cloud support. Actifio can copy data to and from on-premises storage to a wide variety of public cloud providers including Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, IBM Bluemix and Oracle Cloud.

More importantly, it places that data in those respective clouds in a native format so the applications running in those clouds can instantly access it. As it does with on-premises data, an Actifio instance in the cloud can manage a single cloud copy and then present virtual images to cloud based applications.

The 8.0 release also improves Actifio’s cloud mobility capabilities. It can now convert from physical server to a VMware VM’s VMDK to an Amazon AMI. At that point, the VM can run in the Amazon cloud. The solution is not limited to Amazon, it can provide this capability for all of its supported clouds.

In the Amazon use case, Actifio can also convert back to VMDK. For example, a VMware VM could be pushed to Amazon AWS, run for a period of time, a seasonal peak, then be converted back to a VMDK and moved back on-premises.

With data now potentially spread across several clouds and organization owned data centers, knowing what data is where is a big challenge. Fortunately, the 8.0 release provides a global catalog, creating a common metadata index of all data regardless of data. Now multi-cloud organizations can find their data no matter where.

Finally, the 8.0 release unveils Actifio’s Cloud-based customer success. This is an always-on customer engagement platform for monitoring, supporting and resolving the customer’s Actifio architecture. The solution correlates analytics, not actual data, to provide a community approach to identifying and solving problems.

StorageSwiss Take

Organizations are understanding the value of the data they create and collect. As a result, they are storing more data. And that data needs to be operated on by more than the user, application or location that created it. Instead, that data needs to be made available to multiple locations, clouds and other compute services.

Actifio created one market, copy data management, then evolved into a data as a service company based on how enterprises were utilizing the technology. It enables organizations to leverage the data they create and then move that data to the platform or cloud that makes the most sense to operate on that data. 8.0 is a significant step toward unshackling data, while at the same time curtailing its growth so that organizations can extract more value than ever from the data that they store.

Actifio Achieves Dramatic Topline Growth, Progress Toward Profitability

BOSTON, Feb. 28, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Actifio, the Enterprise Data-as-a-Service company, today announced an impressive close to its fiscal 2017, having exceeded major financial and operational targets while strengthening its leadership position in the market. Customers now use Actifio to manage over 250 Petabytes of application data, and over 6 Exabytes of logical data, seamlessly across their on-premises data centers, public cloud service providers and over 120 managed service providers (MSPs) worldwide including Sungard Availability Services, CenturyLink, NTT Data, and Verizon Enterprise Solutions. Other business highlights include:

• Dramatic revenue growth and progress toward profitability - Actifio increased revenue by over 60 percent for the fiscal year that ended January 31, while reducing cash burn by 70 percent.
• Major new customer wins - Actifio added more than 90 new global enterprise customers in Fiscal Year 2017, including multiple Fortune 500 corporations across key verticals including air travel, financial services, healthcare, consulting, manufacturing, retail, and consumer goods. The company's patented Virtual Data Pipeline™ technology is now deployed in over 2,200 enterprises and cloud service providers worldwide.
• Rapid expansion of existing user base - Building on a foundation of delighted users, expansion sales accounted for 70 percent of total sales as enterprises expanded their footprint of use cases to accelerate their digital transformation. Over the last 24 months, sales driven by initiatives to accelerate application development, analytics, and hybrid cloud adoption grew from zero to just under half of the total worldwide sales.
• Significant advancement of Cloud Service Provider partner network - Actifio announced the launch of its Service Provider Marketplace in 2016, an online directory offering Actifio customers access a broad selection of accredited Cloud and Managed Service Providers around the world. Channel partners can also tap the Actifio Marketplace to add white label cloud services to their product portfolios, without the time and capital expense necessary to do so until now.

Powering both the expansion and dramatic productivity gains were a series of product innovations that drove the company's intellectual property portfolio of issued or filed patents to 51. Over the last 12 months, Actifio released the largest set of platform enhancements in the history of the company - many industry firsts - addressing scalability, performance, and strategic requirements of global enterprises looking to accelerate digital transformation. Highlights include:

• The ability for users to establish a seamless multi-cloud, multi-directional hybrid cloud across on-premises data centers, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, and Oracle Cloud.
• The industry's first database virtualization platform across a hybrid cloud architecture using Oracle Cloud. Enterprises can now provision virtual copies of mission critical databases in Oracle Cloud for Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, enhanced business resiliency, and Data Warehousing and analytics applications.
• Actifio OnVault™ - The industry's first low-cost long-term data retention (LTDR) solution, that enables the re-use of data stored inexpensively in AWS S3, Google Cloud Nearline and IBM Cloud Object Storage (formerly Cleversafe) for business intelligence, analytics, compliance, and data warehousing tools to unlock business value.
• Actifio Resiliency Director™ - A major update now provides a complete solution for non-disruptive application recovery and test environment creation from the datacenter to the Cloud. Actifio Resiliency Director enables enterprises to restore critical business functionality faster and cheaper than previously possible, orchestrating compute, network, and data at a cloud service provider or enterprise disaster recovery site, and validating the result.
• StreamSnap - A new data replication capability designed to improve business resiliency by dramatically extending the range of supported Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). These lower RPOs – down to an hour – expand Enterprise Data-as-a-Service use cases by making data available faster at remote sites or in the cloud to accelerate application development or improve business resiliency.
• Actifio Global Manager - A web-scale data virtualization solution delivering instant access and radically simple management of application data for business resiliency and test data management across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.
• AppFlash DevOps Platform - A reference architecture for purpose-built solutions to accelerate DevOps processes. The first implementation of this architecture is built with Pure Storage to deliver a complete solution that sets a new industry benchmark for accelerating application development and agility while reducing cost.

startclickprintexclude endclickprintexclude

startclickprintexclude endclickprintexclude

Actifio is now the world's leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service (EDaaS) platform. It enables thousands of users around the world to deliver their data just as they deliver their applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. An enterprise-class software platform powered by patented Virtual Data Pipeline™ technology, Actifio frees data from traditional infrastructure to accelerate adoption of hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.

As more global enterprises leverage a data-as-a-service model, leading industry analysts have taken notice. Gartner defines this growing business and technology trend in their recently published "Hype Cycle for Information Infrastructure, 2016" (July 2016):

"Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) is a design approach or a style of information architecture geared toward transformation of raw data into meaningful data assets for agile/timely data provisioning, and the delivery of these data assets on demand via consistent, prebuilt access, with the aid of standard processing and connectivity protocols. Originating data remains local to its storage platform and, following various steps to access, format, evaluate and possibly even contextualize it, is presented as output for use in a subsequent process or delivery endpoint."

Among enablers of the DaaS model, only Actifio is:

• Agile: Providing instant access to data, anywhere
• Independent: No vendor lock-in, on the box or in the cloud
• Resilient: With data protection built right in, instead of bolted on
• Secure: Hardened for enterprise security, governance
• Scalable: From a single application to a global enterprise

"We started last year with the goal of becoming a real business," said Ash Ashutosh, Founder and CEO of Actifio, "meaning one that is not only growing but scaling sustainably over time. The results we're sharing today provide positive proof of our progress in achieving this goal, and set up a  2017 we believe will see us established as the data platform of choice for the enterprise-class hybrid cloud architectures that will dominate the next generation of information technology."

To read more on Actifio's recent announcements visit the website, here.

To learn more about Actifio's EDaaS solutions read Ash's blog, here, and download the EDaaS whitepaper, here. 

About Actifio
Actifio is the world's leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service (EDaaS) platform. It enables thousands of users around the world to deliver their data just as they deliver their applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. An enterprise-class software platform powered by patented Virtual Data Pipeline™ technology, Actifio frees data from traditional infrastructure to accelerate adoption of hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability. For more, visit Actifio.com or follow us on Twitter @Actifio.