This ESG Showcase was commissioned by Dell Technologies and is distributed under license from ESG.

Market Landscape

ESG conducted custom research

for Dell Technologies to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges that IT

professionals face in protecting their on-prem VM environments, whether those environments are rapidly growing or are

already very large in size. Findings (see Figure 1) show that data protection has become a major functional pain point

related to VM deployments, with multiple data protection mechanisms often being used to protect them.

Figure 1. Top Data Protection Challenges in Large VM Deployments

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group

Source: ESG Research Insights Paper commissioned by Dell Technologies, Data Protection Trends in Virtual Environments, February 2020. All ESG

research references and charts in this showcase have been taken from this custom research, unless otherwise noted.

53%

57%

58%

60%

65%

Cost control/reduction

Ease of management

Increasing automation/operational

efficiency

Agility

Protecting VMs and data

IT staff skill sets

At the highest level, what pain points or areas of challenge is your organization working to

eliminate or reduce when it comes to its existing VM environment? (Percent of respondents,

N=300, multiple responses accepted)

Protection is the number one

functional challenge to be

resolved when it comes to VMs.

ESG SHOWCASE

Modernizing VM Backup at Scale without

Compromise—with Dell Technologies

Date: August 2021 Authors: Christophe Bertrand, Senior Analyst; and Monya Keane, Senior Research Analyst

ABSTRACT: VM snapshots have been available for data protection purposes for many years. But until now, alternative

approaches amounted to “band aids.” They could not meet all the requirements of scaling with performance, forcing

organizations to accept tradeoffs. That is why Dell Technologies, based on extensive customer feedback, has developed a

new technology that integrates with VMware products called Transparent Snapshots—simplifying the way that rapidly

growing VMs can be protected at scale in today’s highly transactional, data-intensive workload environments.

Enterprise Strategy Group | Getting to the bigger truth.™

Showcase: Modernizing VM Backup at Scale without Compromise—with Dell Technologies 2

The backup environment itself is the reason many organizations are missing their data protection SLAs. Fifty-three percent

of the respondents to this research survey reported that their backup environments are most often the root cause of

RTO/RPO failures. Clearly, organizations need to do a better job fixing the avoidable causes behind those missed SLAs.

Although virtualization-specific backup methodologies have been on the market for many years, backup and recovery

success is still not a sure thing. Respondents reported that, on average, they can only backup and restore 77% of on-

premises VMs successfully (i.e., backups finish without errors, and VMs and associated workloads can be restored).

Disruptive backups can cause significant problems for critical applications and processes across an entire business. Until

now, most VM backup technologies have proven to be too limited for large-scale or rapidly growing VM environments. The

result is that IT organizations have been forced to accept tradeoffs, which ultimately leads to negative consequences in

terms of operational efficiency.

Dell Technologies recognized the obvious need to revisit existing data protection options for VM deployments and

developed technology to bridge this gap. The result is improved key performance indicators, reliably protected VMs, and

better supported business processes at a real-world level.

Why Traditional VM Backup Methods Fall Short

When VMware first introduced virtual machines, everybody was backing them up using a physical agent-based backup

approach. Then, in 2009, VMware came out with VADP (VMware APIs for Data Protection). That advancement enabled

image-based backups with dynamic policies.

Since 2009, however, there hadn’t been a lot of innovation in regard to protecting VMs. Everybody’s still leveraging the

same APIs to do image-based backups. This is unfortunate, considering the fact that data in VM-based workloads has

grown rampantly.

Some organizations tried to leverage snapshot-based protection via storage array integration, but they still faced

challenges related to maintaining acceptable performance at scale. Cost issues and management difficulties arose. Other

organizations tried leveraging journaling/continuous data protection (CDP) technologies to meet their tight SLAs. That

approach narrowed their operational recovery windows. And of course, CDP can be an expensive process.

The bottom line is that organizations maintaining big or fast-growing VMware environments have trouble backing up large

numbers of VMs and large individual VMs. Notably, the mission-critical VMs these organizations are trying to protect with

legacy technology such as VADP are predominantly on-premises. Regardless, it makes little sense today to use the same

technology that existed more than ten years ago to do backups and still hope to meet SLA windows. It’s why organizations

have found themselves faced with what seems like an impossible data protection trade off: Either compromise production

performance, or give up on meeting established backup-related service-level metrics.

Companies tend to run into backup-window issues when their VM environments grow large … or grow fast. That’s because

they are now doing lots of deltas (i.e., backing up changed data). Performance issues in the production environment often

ensue. The performance-impact problem has become so severe that many organizations have been forced to revert to

less-granular agent-based backup, getting away from image-based VADP backup. But then, they lose their dynamic

policies. They’re essentially back to using an approach not from 2009, but 2003.

That’s one of the reasons why it is such a promising development that Dell Technologies has figured out how to help

organizations avoid performance impacts to their environments, yet still achieve a remarkably simpler, far less obtrusive

way to do image-based backups and granular-level recoveries—all at a massive scale.