Native File Provisioning: Formatting for Peace of mind.

One of the things I truly love about taking time to speak with industry peers is the productive feedback one receives, and who doesn’t like to talk? Based off this last week of chats with our customers, there was a reoccurring motif being raised regarding the native file format of the vmPRO. How does this breakaway feature from the industry norm manage to protect virtual data without proprietary format?

Here is a great link to a VMblog interview highlighting Quantum’s use of native file format:

http://vmblog.com/archive/2013/06/27/q-a-interview-with-quantum-tal...

Unsurprisingly, the native file format of the vmPRO Software has received copious amounts of attention. Since this format is the de facto standard for virtual machines in VMware vSphere, this leads to new questions for experts pertaining to their networks. For instance, how does native format benefit my environment?

We must first point out just what makes the native VMDK file format different from the formats being used by our industry peers. First, vmPRO is designed to back up VMs while creating copies of the original files. This not only prevents the end user from being locked into a proprietary format while attempting to save data, but also provides a future of flexibility when you need to restore those backups because no software is required to open or convert the backup files.

This explanation circles back to a fantastic question we received earlier this week:

How will help my environment in case of disaster recovery?

In a perfect world, backup and archiving software will provide infallible archiving capabilities and direct file restore in the most detrimental cases of disaster recovery.

As much as most of us would prefer to never have to deal with disaster recovery, emergencies happen and it's good to know what can be of the most assistance.

However, restores are an essential operation that should be able to instantly boot VMs from any DR site, even the cloud. By utilizing native file format, customers are able to recover and access backup and archive data without the hindrance of proprietary backup applications. This can, in many situations, slow down the retrieval process considerably due to a lack of direct access to the original files. By implementing a ‘raw’ data solution, one has the ability to cull down unused or unimportant information for a more efficient workflow.

Next week: More information on how Native file format helps in choosing a license size!

 Download available at: www.quantum.com/freevmpro