Thank you sunburn.
Between my sparkly vampiric skin (A shame I don't have the Twilight hair) and the obvious lack of ozone in California, (which I think has been dissipated by the sense of self importance of the silicon valley community), it's been a sad and stinging lesson. But now I'm back to wearing the factor 50+ sunscreen. Hallelujah!
As I tap this out on the bus on my way to Tuesdays sessions of fun & frolic I find yesterday was interesting as a first day at VMworld. Interesting to me at how good VMware has been at building a strong community of end users and how much those end users love not a particular product but the entire system surrounding the products. It's also interesting to me at how the keynotes are kinda like EMC's. Load the shotgun full of product launches and blast the seated audience with both barrels.
The first vSphere Data Protection (VDP) session went well, double digit number of questions and that's always a good sign, but one of the questions is worth repeating just to get the answer down.
'What's the difference between VDP & Avamar?'
Valid question, there's a clear answer and it boils down to scale and functionality. VDP is an image level backup product capable of protecting up to 100 virtual machines per VDP instance. Avamar is capable of protecting thousands of virtual machines be that as image level or application consistent agent (guest) level backups. VDP today isn't integrated with Data Domain via Boost, Avamar is. VDP doesn't have extended retention for long term preservation of backups on virtual or physical tape. Avamar does. VDP doesn't backup physical systems or Network Attached Storage devices using NDMP. Avamar can.
Etc, etc, sic transit gloria mundi.
The bottom line is that VDP is squarely aimed at small and medium business while Avamar spans the mid-market and traverses into the enterprise.
The difference between them? Scale and functionality.
