How to Get 10x Better Performance, Scalability and Efficiency for VM Backups

By Symantec Guest Blog

Performance and scalability are critical for customers backing up their virtual environment. It’s unacceptable for backups to negatively impact your customer’s production applications, and they need fast, efficient performance to satisfy ever-shrinking backup windows.

Is it possible to get everything–performance, scalability and efficiency–in a virtual machine (VM) backup solution? To answer that question, Principled Technologies, a research firm, conducted virtual machine benchmark tests in a real-world, enterprise environment to determine how four different backup solutions performed. Their results showed that Veritas NetBackup had far better performance, scalability and efficiency than Competitor V, Competitor E or Competitor C.

Backing up virtual machines requires transferring data from point A to point B. In VMware vSphere, this is done with vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP).  Most backup solutions utilize VADP to transfer the data, but did you know that some are more efficient than others?  Using a backup solution that has a weak integration with VADP will put a strain on customer environments and increase the time to back up information. It’s critical that backup and recovery solutions are as efficient as possible when integrating with VADP to transfer data, and, as the testing results demonstrate, Veritas NetBackup performed far better than Competitor V, Competitor E, or Competitor C.

Scalability and Lightning-Fast Performance
Principled Technologies’ research found that NetBackup had up to 10 times faster performance than competitors–even when backing up 1,000 VMs. NetBackup continued to have optimized performance even as the payload increased 10-fold. Competitor V, Competitor E and Competitor C. didn’t come close–and took even longer to complete backups as the number of VMs increased.

Protecting 10x More VMs with Minimal Impact on Production Applications
While performance and scalability are important, the amount of CPU usage required by a backup solution is also critical. By using less CPU, there’s a smaller performance impact on customer environments and more resources are available for production applications.

NetBackup, again, outperformed the competition. The NetBackup media server operated at less than 50 percent utilization for about 20 percent of the total time needed to back up 1,000 VMs. This means NetBackup could protect 10,000 VMs with the same amount of processing power that Competitor C takes to back up only 1,000 VMs. Other backup solutions took longer and used more processing power. Just imagine the negative impact that could have on your customer’s production applications.

What Would 10x Better Performance, Scalability and Efficiency Gain You?
The Principled Technologies’ study proves NetBackup is the clear leader in performance, scalability and efficiency. What else could users gain from NetBackup?

Learn More about Optimizing Your Backups
If scalability, performance and efficiency are important to your enterprise customers, learn more about NetBackup and how it outperforms the competition.  View our recent webcast Benchmarking Backup Solutions for Protecting Large-Scale VMware vSphere Environments or visit http://veritas.symantec.com/backup/nbu/.

Joe Disher is Director of Product Marketing. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of The VAR Guy's annual platinum sponsorship.