3PAR has announced two new plugins for VMware’s vCenter. The first sounds pretty standard, but the second one promises to change backup procedures forever.
The first plugin is a “standard” management plugin that allows administrators to view details about a virtual machine’s storage, such as the RAID level and type of drives used in the underlying storage system. This plugin is available immediately for existing 3PAR customers; more details can be found in this datasheet.
The more interesting part of today’s release is the Recovery Manager. This plugin adds advanced snapshot and backup functionality to vCenter; administrators can create VM snapshots using just this plugin. It also allows for the easy creation of snapshot-based copies for testing and provisioning new virtual machines. But the killer feature will be recovery:
With 3PAR Recovery Manager for VMware vSphere, VMware administrators can create hundreds of VM-aware, point-in-time snapshots using a simple, automated process. Protect and recover Virtual Machine Disks (VMDKs), VMware vStorage Virtual Machine File Systems (VMFS), individual VMs, and even individual files.
If this plugin works as promised, this could replace lots of existing, agent-based backup systems; creating VM-snapshots is both easier and faster and saves valuable storage space. The plugin is available now with a starting price of $3000 per InServ Storage Server. The only reservation I’d personally have is the “putting all eggs in one basket” factor. One of the basic features I like to see in disaster recovery strategies is vendor-independence; having agent-based backups to a separate system just in case the primary storage fails makes me sleep better at night.
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