Top Reasons: Virtualized Workloads with NetBackup

One solution for complete protection of your entire virtualized environment.

Virtualization is a force that has been fueling the digital transformation of companies for years. With over 90% of businesses using some form of server virtualization today,¹ it has helped them optimize their hardware usage with a 50% reduction in hardware and maintenance costs. It has allowed them to realize a 50-90% reduction in time for server management tasks.² And it even helps promote environmental sustainability, by reducing energy consumption by up to 80%.³ With all these benefits, it’s no surprise that virtualization is now a standard practice in data centers across the globe.

With so many hypervisor options to choose from in today’s market, IT leaders must consider a number of factors to determine the offering that will best meet their needs: cost effectiveness, scalability, ease of use, performance, and security. Many businesses are also considering the benefits of containerization — a lightweight alternative to virtualization — due to its even greater portability and efficiency. But since all containers share the same host operating system, they can create additional security concerns that do not exist in fully virtualized environments, which provide stronger isolation at the host level.

To bridge that gap, open-source projects like KubeVirt are offering the best of both worlds – the strong isolation provided by VMs along with all the flexibility and efficiency of Kubernetes. But no matter which path your organization chooses (see Table 1), Cohesity is here to support your virtualization journey every step of the way.

Supported hypervisors
Azure Stack
Hyper-V
Kubernetes / KubeVirt
Nutanix AHV
OpenStack
Oracle Linux VM
RedHat OpenShift
VMware

Table 1. All major hypervisors supported, along with a wide range of advanced capabilities.

Top Reasons to Protect Your Virtualized Environment with Cohesity

1. Flexibility and Simplicity

Cohesity NetBackup makes the management of your virtualized environment a seamless and integrated experience with the following capabilities.

Agentless protection – allows you to easily integrate new hypervisors and VMs into your existing data protection environment without the need to install agents on VM clients.
Intelligent groups – provides the ability to create logical groups of VMs based on pre-defined criteria (name, storage container, power state, etc.). Different protection levels can then be assigned to different VM groups, and new VMs are automatically added to the appropriate protection policy as they come online.
Enterprise visibility with Helios – presents a single, aggregated view of the entire data protection environment, including an AI-powered operational assistant that can automatically discover unprotected assets, recommend and implement new backup policies, and more.
No third-party requirements – all hypervisor and Kubernetes protection is provided by the core NetBackup architecture, without the need for third-party add-ons or plug-ins.

2. Performance and Efficiency

Just as containerization has improved upon the performance and efficiency of traditional virtualized environments, NetBackup’s architecture has evolved to become a highly scalable, cloud-native solution that protects your virtualized infrastructure with ease:

Multi-stream backup and recovery – further reduces backup windows and recovery times by allowing for parallel data streams to be transmitted simultaneously between clients and storage targets.
Integrated cloud storage – allows highly scalable tiering of data directly to your choice of cloud providers (or Cohesity FortKnox) across all supported hypervisors.
Storage lifecycle policies – provides a consistent way to direct how backups are stored. Configure multiple storage operations such as duplication, import, index from snapshot, and replication, all in one place.
Deduplication and Universal Shares – provides a universal, space-efficient ingestion point for backup data that is automatically catalogued and deduplicated along with full access to key NetBackup features such as point-in-time copies, replication, data retention, and instant recovery.

By consolidating data protection tools into one solution, companies can recover and redeploy up to 35% of their current spending through greater visibility, standardization, and oversight.⁴

3. Confidence and Control

With reliable and comprehensive protection, NetBackup meets the toughest service-level agreements (SLAs) while providing the granularity and control that today’s organizations require. NetBackup delivers enterprise-class confidence and control with the following features:

Granular recovery – provides the ability to restore individual files or folders as required, saving time and avoiding disruption.
Bulk recovery – recover hundreds of VMs in minutes using change block tracking, instant rollback, and/or snapshot technology to minimize recovery time and network load.
Cross-cloud recovery – reads data from a source cloud provider and then writes/recovers to a different cloud provider, allowing seamless data movement between hypervisors and ensuring recoverability in multi-cloud environments.
Recommended recovery points with RecoveryAgent – uses AI to provide an in-depth analysis of recommended recovery points that minimize recovery time and potential data loss.

4. Zero-Doubt Cyber Resilience

With threat actors continually evolving the nature of their attacks, businesses need help ensuring their data and credentials are secure – and they need to recover quickly and confidently if a breach does occur. Veritas ensures confident cyber resilience with zero doubt through the following capabilities:

Adaptive self-defense – proactively monitors user behavior to guard against internal and external threats and prevent irreversible data destruction.
AI-powered anomaly detection – analyzes changes in backup metadata and other attributes to alert administrators to potential threats, ensuring the same ransomware protection regardless of which hypervisor is used.
Threat hunting and blast radius analysis – performs searches for malware and other potential indicators of compromise (IOCs) in a highly efficient way that scales across the entire enterprise environment.
Cyber resilience dashboard with Helios – a global dashboard that highlights malware detections, anomalies, and an overall risk score. Also provides a detailed inventory of risk factors that are classified by severity and aggregated across all assets and data centers.

Comprehensive Protection of Your Entire Virtualized Environment

There are many factors to consider when choosing the right virtualized platform to support your organization’s digital transformation strategy. But whether you plan to utilize one hypervisor or several in your environment, Cohesity has you covered end-to-end.

Achieve the assurance of protection for your hypervisors with the flexibility, efficiency, control, and security that is required by your business. NetBackup — the industry’s most trusted market-leading data protection solution.

^{1: Spiceworks – State of Virtualization Technology}

^{2: G2.com – Unveiling the Future: 32 Virtualization Statistics and Trends}

^{3: VMware – How VMware Virtualization Right-sizes IT Infrastructure to Reduce Power Consumption}

^{4: McKinsey – Reducing Data Costs Without Jeopardizing Growth}