This is a first for me. I’m used to referencing and quoting other people’s blog entries, but this is the first time I’m going to reference a comment of a blog entry. David Vallante of Wikibon, who has been kind enough to engage in a brief dialog on this blog, recently had the following comment in regard to the Nirvanix post I referenced immediately before this one:
I was at the New England VMUG yesterday and had numerous conversations that were somewhat related to this discussion. I was amazed at how many VMware customers told me that they were able to essentially relax their backup practices because they were using Site Recovery Manager.
I plan to send them this link. Nice job summarizing.
I run into the same issue with some buyers and customers. I once even ran into someone who told me that they didn’t need to perform backups anymore since they had adopted VMware. That was a pretty short conversation – I asked a few questions about retention, viruses, backup compliance, recovery, and the like and we quickly moved on to how to best solve some core backup, archive, and recovery issues that were facing the company.
I’m a big fan of VMware and virtualization in general. Like many high technology companies, my company uses the technology extensively – and of course we support VMware in our backup appliances.
But as I’ve noted before, confusing backup with high availability is dangerous – both to the career of IT professionals as well as to a company’s ability to both recover its systems and data as well as its ability to conform to the increasing regulations coming from Washington.
