Williamstown, MA -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/20/2009 -- This report takes a look at ACS's business at the mid-point of 2009, just before the acquisition approach by Xerox. It provides insight into ACS's business composition, performance and strategy.

Report Table of Contents:

Executive summary
Recommendations
Backup issues are common to both sides of the virtual looking glass
Automation is king
Policy-based is the best policy
Recovery is the better part of backup
Backup issues are unique to the virtual world
Where have all the cycles gone?
Sprawling servers gum up the works
Sleeping virtual servers slip the net
Defining backup service levels
Recovery time objective
Recovery point objective
Continuous data protection
Granularity
Some backups are worthless
Crash consistency
File consistency
Application consistency
De-duplication is just as useful in the virtual world
De-duplication and backup are tied at the hip
Target de-duplication requires no change for virtual servers
De-dupe at the source
Sticking with traditional backup architectures
Keeping the backup story simple
Placing an agent in every virtual server
Advantages
Disadvantages
Placing an agent in every host
Advantages
Disadvantages
Happy snapping in the SAN or NAS pool
Using the tools in disk arrays
Advantages
Disadvantages
VCB - VMware's first helping hand
Offloading the hosts
How it works
Advantages
Disadvantages
VCB is updated transparently
Evolution and a new name
A slew of good things
What changed?
Living with a background load
Backup vendors back VADP quickly
Don't confuse VADP with the VMware Data Recovery tool

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