Posts by Michael Bose
Instant VM Recovery from Backup
Restoring a VM from backup may take significant time, as it is necessary to retrieve its data from a backup and reconstruct an original machine. However, in some cases, you do not have much time to wait until this process is complete. For example, the original VM got damaged, and you do not have a […]
Posted on June 21, 2017 by Michael Bose
VM Backup vs. VM Replication
VM backup and replication are essential parts of a data protection plan. At the first look, they seem similar and interchangeable, and this is partly true. VM backup and replication pursue different goals, so you need to think of them both when setting up a data protection plan and understand the difference between them. VM […]
Posted on June 9, 2017 by Michael Bose
RPO and RTO: What Is the Difference and Why You Should Care?
The ultimate goal of data protection is clear: you want to be sure that you will not lose data if something goes wrong. However, it is quite costly to mirror all the changes in your virtual environment to a DR site. That is why you need to accept the idea that you will lose some […]
Posted on June 7, 2017 by Michael Bose
GFS Retention Policy Explained
At first, let’s recap what retention policy is and why we need it. Ideally, the goal of backup is the ability to recover data from any point back in time. The straightforward way to do that is to keep periodical backups, usually daily. However, even with space-saving techniques like forever-incremental backups, synthetic backups, data compression, […]
Posted on June 2, 2017 by Michael Bose
How Does Forever-Incremental Backup Work on VMs?
The simplest way of backing up a VM is doing the full backup. You just need to copy an entire virtual machine to a backup repository. This simplicity has its price: making the full backup takes a long time, loads production networks, and uses a significant amount of space. One of the ways to reduce […]
Posted on May 29, 2017 by Michael Bose
Benefits and Technologies of LAN-free Backup
During a backup, large amounts of data are transferred through the networks and can cause a slowdown of business-critical operations. Network administrators use various approaches to minimize the impact of backups on the daily operations. Among those are scheduling backups off the business hours and traffic-reducing techniques such as data compression and forever incremental backups. […]
Posted on May 26, 2017 by Michael Bose
Backup Deduplication Explained
Large virtual infrastructures generate a vast amount of backup data that leads to the increase of spending on storage infrastructure: storage appliances themselves and their maintenance. So network administrators are looking for the ways to save storage space. One of the widely-used techniques is backup deduplication. A concept of deduplication is almost as old as […]
Posted on May 22, 2017 by Michael Bose
Image-based vs. File-based Backup
Image-based and file-based backup pursue different goals, and although they can be interchangeable, it is better to understand the purpose and the meaning of each of them. When it comes to backing up separate files, the first thing that comes to mind is popular backup services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, or iCloud. People […]
Posted on May 15, 2017 by Michael Bose