Dan's Take

NAKIVO Adds Hyper-V to Virtual Machine Backup and Replication Portfolio

New cloud challenges require new solutions.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 03/30/2017

I recently had a talk with NAKIVO about backing up, recovering and replicating virtual machines (VMs) in a multi-platform environment. The heart of that discussion was version 7 of its software, which adds support for Microsoft's Hyper-V.

Since each of these VM software platforms has different configuration rules and management environments, simply copying VM files from one place to another doesn't really offer things such as:

• Real Backup/replication
• Verification of the backup
• Recovery of an entire VM
• Granular recovery of specific files from a VM
• Data transfer from one environment to another
• Deduplication
• A reasonable way to deal with multi-tenant environments
• A way to support self-service backups or recovery

Back in 2012, NAKIVO was founded to address these and other issues related to disaster recovery in a VM-based computing environment. The company has worked with resellers around the world to support small to medium businesses and enterprises. According to the company, "over 1,700 software solution providers in 115 countries across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Middle-East, and Asia-Pacific have joined NAKIVO Partner Program and offer NAKIVO data protection products to their SMB and Enterprise customers."

What's New in Version 7?
NAKIVO has built upon its successful products for VMware and AWS and added Hyper-V to the supported platforms. The company points out that V7 offers support for Hyper-V 2016 and 2012 (R2); backup that is image-based, forever-incremental and application-aware; instant recovery for files, Exchange objects, Active Directory objects; and backup deduplication/compression, backup copy and network acceleration. With V7, the company  now offers its technology for VMware, AWS and Hyper-V in a single package. (At this point, if the enterprise has standardized on Xen or a KVM-based environment, NAKIVO doesn't offer a solution.)

Dan's Take: Disaster Recovery Needs To Be Built Into Enterprise Deployments
Many enterprises have long allowed their IT application portfolio to grow organically, rather than having a single, comprehensive plan. That means that each department or business unit determined its own requirements and went on to adopt its own platforms, tools and computing environments.

As the IT planners in each of these departments or business units are deciding to move to cloud computing, it's not at all uncommon for each of them to select their own VM software, application development frameworks, database engines and cloud service providers. If the enterprise is using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, disaster planning can be even more complex, since it's unlikely that the supplier will have published what's going on behind the curtain.

This pattern, of course, creates chaos for the enterprise IT staff tasked with making absolutely sure that enterprise applications are always reliable and available. Since different tools are needed to support each computing environment, the number of tools needed and expertise required seems to grow constantly.

NAKIVO appears to be addressing that chaotic computing environment with a set of tools designed to address the needs of many computing environments.