As a StorageCraft evangelist, I find it worthwhile to download and read competitors’ white papers. This tactic usually gives me a good angle on the strengths and weaknesses of different vendors’ product offerings.
Well, very recently I downloaded a “buyer’s guide” type document from another vendor. The buyer’s guide was tailored to the vendor’s own “hyperconverged solution.” Often, when I start reading a document like this, I quickly realize it’s all FUD … sometimes extreme, over-the-top FUD, and I forget all about it shortly after reading.
This time, this document, the more I read it … well, the more I wanted to bring it along with me when I speak to partners and customers and evangelize StorageCraft’s ShadowXafe™ and OneXafe™ Converged!
The key idea the guide pointed out is that it’s a cumulative set of features that make a backup and recovery solution “modern,” and I totally agree.
It’s not just the fact that StorageCraft has never offered “siloed” solutions for physical environments or different hypervisors. Heck, for over a decade I’ve been preaching, “StorageCraft is agnostic to hardware and hypervisor!” … preaching it like it was recorded on an endless 8-track tape loop! It’s not just that we can replicate to our own Cloud Services solution, which is a DR cloud that offers full orchestration for full site failover, regardless of source hardware or hypervisor. Or that inexpensive public cloud storage is also an option, with replication to, and recovery out of, Azure, AWS, and Dropbox to name a few.
Remember discussions around VMware host-based vs. agent-based backups? Not with StorageCraft! Just pick and choose host- or agent-based backup on a per VM basis.
Other features of StorageCraft’s ShadowXafe and OneXafe Converged include:
Encryption-at-rest,
In-flight backup encryption,
Scale-out object storage with fixed or variable-length inline deduplication,
Access to backup storage via SMB, NFS, or direct-to-object-store,
Bare metal restore capability,
and more!
Yes … one can deem this a feature-rich, check-the-checkboxes dream!
But, even with all the above, what really stands out for me as a key differentiator in StorageCraft’s ShadowXafe and OneXafe Converged backup and recovery solutions is how it works within a VMware environment. To explain, here's an example. Let’s say you have a VMware vSphere® infrastructure, and let’s make the following assumptions about that environment:
- Shared high-availability (HA) storage for the VMware infrastructure
- Multiple VMware ESXi hosts leveraging Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (DRS) and HA
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