Quest's vRanger 6.0 Combines Physical and Virtual Server Backup: Page 2 of 2

InformationWeek Reports' "2012 State of the Data Center" found that of 256 business technology professional surveyed in April 2012, 50% said half or more of their production servers will be virtualized by the end of 2013; for a small yet aggressive 9%, it's more than 90%. This is actually a lower figure than reported in the InformationWeek Virtualization Management Survey conducted in August 2011, which found that 63% of respondents expected to have half or more of their production servers virtualized by the end of 2011.

Robert Amatruda, research director, data protection and recovery, at IDC, says Quest's decision to add physical backup, replication and recovery to vRanger makes sense because enterprises have both physical and virtual servers in production. "They still need products that really bridge the gap between physical and virtual."

Amatruda says large, incumbent data protection/recovery vendors with roots in physical, on-premise products were all caught somewhat flat-footed when the trend toward virtualization first took off a few years ago, allowing smaller vendors such as Veeam and PHD Virtual to step in to fill the void. Quest isn't making a dramatic change by adding physical data protection to vRanger, he adds, but bridging that gap between two infrastructures that enterprises are supporting. Symantec Backup Exec also provides data protection for both virtual and nonvirtual environments.

However, having one tool that manages data protection for both physical and virtual environments isn't insignificant for enterprises, says Amatruda. Companies tend to invest in tools for the long term as they don't lend themselves to a rip-and-replace approach; software is upgraded incrementally. He says vendors such as Quest have an opportunity within their own customer bases to address a need for a unified tool.

Jason Buffington, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), says vRanger's new physical data protection features would definitely appeal to existing customers looking to reduce the complexity of working with multiple tools, especially since the technology isn't radically new and leverages their existing physical data protection expertise from existing products such as NetVault, as well as vRanger features. "This is not brand-spanking-new stuff that might be untried," he says. "It's just a smarter way to utilize it."

Buffington adds that existing vRanger customers won't see a great deal of difference using vRanger for physical backups, as it employs a very similar UI.

Recent research conducted by ESG found there was a 50/50 split between organizations that use a virtual data protection-only tool such as vRanger, versus those that use a unified tool that supports both, says Buffington. Seventy percent would rather have a unified option.

What's really changed, he says, is that virtual backups aren't as difficult as they were once were, and with many vendors from either side moving toward the middle, reliable backups are no longer the key differentiator. "Just about everybody, using a myriad of approaches, can back up a VM," he says. "How well and how fast can you restore it?" Whether it's the whole VM, a partial VM or granular objects such as mail messages or files, he says, a significant differentiator will be the ability to easily restore data. "The real battleground is around restore, flexibility and agility."

VRanger 6.0 will be generally available in the fourth quarter of this year. Virtual machine licenses for vRanger 6.0 will be priced at $769 on a per-CPU basis, while physical machine licenses will be priced at just $300 on a per-server basis. The software is VMware Ready-certified for vSphere 5.