Backup Technology has recently become a member of SpiceWorks, with the aim to help fellow IT professionals with any problems that they may be having with data backup and disaster recovery.  It is always interesting to hear suggestions from other backup providers as to how their software would approach certain problems or environments. It is especially interesting to hear how other IT professionals have solved the backup conundrums they have faced.

However, just recently I’ve started to wonder if customers are being coerced into changing how they operate their production environments, just so that a specific vendor wins the deal.  A very recent, and pertinent example of this was for an environment with a mix of Physical and Virtual servers. This poses significant challenges for Virtualisation specific backup software.

To my dismay and surprise, not one but 4 of the suggestions were that the user, who had a 60TB estate, should virtualise the rest of his environment, just so he could use the Virtualisation specific backup software Veeam.

An enterprise backup solution should be able to integrate fully into any environment, physical or virtual and give the customer the ability to protect their entire environment without alteration!  It is after all the production environment that matters the most and if a backup solution is unable to protect that environment, the product is not a correct fit!

There are plenty of backup solutions available on the market to fit every clients requirements and just because the ‘trendy’ solution doesn’t fit, doesn’t mean you should be trying to shoe horn it in!

Have you altered your production environment to fit a backup solution? Have people recommended that you alter your production environment so that their backup solution will fit?