Another August, another VMworld! As always, it’s a hectic, crazy time of non-stop activity and the San Francisco weather could not be more spectacular.
Once again this year, Syncsort is running the Race to Recovery in our booth (#501 if you’re at the show). If you’re not familiar with it, in the Race to Recovery we invite two audience members up on stage to run a live VM recovery. No canned demos, no tricks: the software is running live on ESX servers and NetApp storage. So far this week, the fastest recovery time has been 1 minutes and six seconds! That’s pretty good time to restore a VM. If you’d like to participate, stop by the booth to check out the next scheduled demonstration. The fastest recovery time each day wins an iPad and we’ve got two more days to go.
Aside from the Race to Recovery, we’ve been talking with lots of users and one theme has really come out this year: lots of backup products don’t work. I’m not going to name any names, but I’ve heard a number of stories this week about well known backup products that just aren’t doing what the vendors claimed they could do. Products that worked in the lab with 30 VMs but died in production with 300 VMs. Products that take forever to get a backup done and that take several days to complete a Bare Metal Restore process (that product was replaced with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB), and BMR restore is now just an hour or so). A product that has been installed for six months and isn’t working yet!
Some of the users are still struggling along with their products, others were telling stories from the past before they switched to NSB. The most amazing single statistic was a customer that used to need eight hours to back up their Exchange server and is now backing it up in five minutes! That’s right, five minutes! You can’t even quantify that as a backup “improvement.” It’s a backup revolution.
Across all these conversations what struck me was something that I don’t always appreciate about NSB, which is that it works. You get used to that and you forget that not everything else works as advertised. But NSB’s simplified architecture, exceptional reliability and deep integration with NetApp storage combine to provide a solution that does what you need it to do. Back up fast with little impact, restore in minutes, and integrate with replication and disaster recovery for a complete solution.
Drop by booth #501 to learn more.
{ 0 comments… add one now }