With the right tools, SMBs can enjoy the same benefits that server virtualization brings to larger enterprises: increased server utilization, reduced power consumption, simplified IT load, and the flexibility to quickly adapt to changing business needs. However, a lack of resources and expertise creates specific challenges for SMBs, especially when it comes to backup and disaster recovery.

As a result, small and medium businesses need a backup and disaster recovery toolset that meets their characteristics, technology, and resource utilization. In particular, the solution should be an easy-to-use image-based approach that provides fast backup and disaster recovery solutions with minimal backup size and bandwidth consumption.

1. Speed of backup and disaster recovery

    IT operators often don't have a lot of time to create backups. In this case, if a piece of automation has a script that doesn't execute as planned, they also don't have much time to fix the problem.

Also, the shared resource model of virtualization makes timing backup jobs more difficult, if not impossible. IT staff needs to analyze servers that are rapidly changing due to live migration to ensure that only a certain number of backup jobs are running at a time.

    Recovery is more challenging. Data loss for a small business is as life-and-death as data loss for a large business. IT staff must be prepared to diagnose and replace failed hardware, determine the availability of up-to-date data and processing status, and load this data into appropriate virtual machines for use.

The ideal solution should be able to provide fast backups, whether incremental or full, and be able to perform recovery during business hours, rather than requiring overnight or days of shutdown to find and replace lost data.

2. Backup size and bandwidth consumption

    The IT computing and network resources of many SMBs are adequate for normal operations, but have little to no functionality for creating, transferring, and storing backup files. They are often reluctant to buy or lease additional functionality because the cost is not one-time and not directly related to the success of the business. Most businesses will perform some degree of data loss preparation, but likely will not have the network bandwidth or storage capacity for the backups required for multiple virtual machines.

    Backup and recovery tools should provide SMBs with the ability to limit backup size using incremental backups and advanced compression. These features also reduce the bandwidth consumption of backup and restore processes, allowing IT teams to generate and restore backups in less time.

Note that feature combinations and quantities are not listed here. Small and medium-sized businesses are generally not interested in multiple features because they often lack the time to learn and implement them. Additionally, many of the complex backup and recovery features are primarily used in large and complex data centers, not in small and medium-sized business equipment.

The most useful solutions utilize image-based backup and recovery, which is faster than file-based methods. Costs are reduced due to direct disk reading and empty blocks in the mirror are skipped, resulting in a smaller backup copy than traditional methods; this method can use fewer blocks to store backup copies faster, And will meet the performance and storage needs of many small and medium businesses.