Backup solutions that focus on protecting the virtual environment are becoming increasingly popular. Companies participating in this market include Veeam and PHD Virtual (acquired by Unitrends). But there is another company that is sometimes left out of the conversation that deserves consideration; Nakivo. They just announced version 5.0 of their solution which adds the ability to provide the popular recovery in place feature, but does so with a twist that we have not seen from other vendors.
Nakivo is a rapidly growing provider of virtual machine backup and replication software. They claim a 255% quarter on quarter revenue growth spread across more than 4,100 customers. The product is an all-in-one solution that provides onsite, offsite and cloud based backup and recovery features. It provides the expected laundry list of protection features with several unique capabilities including integrated deduplication and compression, native (non-gateway) cloud backups, and powerful multi-tenancy capabilities.
The headline of the 5.0 release is the addition of a feature that we at Storage Switzerland call recovery in place, but Nakivo calls Flash VM Boot. The feature allows a virtual machine to be booted directly from backup storage. This capability has the potential to significantly reduce recovery time objectives (RTO). The feature can also be used to provide the ultimate backup verification; starting the VM to see if the application will come up.
Despite all the buzz about recovery in place, only available from a few vendors actually deliver the feature, Nakivo being the latest. What makes Nakivo unique is their ability to perform an in place recovery from a compressed and deduplicated backup and still deliver acceptable performance. Most other solutions require, or at least strongly recommend, that the recovery in place storage area be simple non-optimized disk.
StorageSwiss Take
Recovery in place is becoming THE feature. Its ability to cost effectively reduce recovery time objectives is unprecedented. The challenge with recovery in place is what storage to put it on. Do you suffer bad performance on capacity optimized storage (dedupe and compression) or do you demand great performance (straight disk) and increase the price of your backup infrastructure? Nakivo is the first to claim to offer a solution that gives you the best of both worlds, recovery in place that performs well on cost effective, capacity efficient disk.
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Twelve years ago George Crump founded Storage Switzerland with one simple goal; to educate IT professionals about all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought after public speaker. With over 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS and SAN, Virtualization, Cloud and Enterprise Flash. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators where he was in charge of technology testing, integration and product selection.
