By the end of 2012, about 50 percent of enterprise workloads would be running on virtual machines, as per Gartner’s predictions. Gartner also predicts that 60 percent of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical servers they replace through 2012.

These statistics prove that organizations are adopting virtualization solution. But, at the same time it is very critical for organizations to protect the data present in the virtual machines (VMs). And visibility into the VMS can help the organizations; just like an X-ray enables a doctor to visualize injuries inside a patient’s body. It is also important for the organizations to take backups of the VMs and look at technologies that can provide single platform for both physical and virtual machines as handling too many machines leads to complexities.

The risk on VMs is 20 percent more than physical machines. Companies that are not taking backups of the VMs are waiting for the disaster to happen

Deepak Mohan, Senior Vice President, Information Management Group, Symantec

“The risk on VMs is 20 percent more than physical machines. Companies that are not taking backups of the VMs are waiting for the disaster to happen,” asserted Deepak Mohan, Senior Vice President, Information Management Group, Symantec.

He further claimed that Symantec V-Ray (which is the name for a group of Symantec technologies) gives organizations greater visibility into the virtual environments and to the applications residing within the virtual machines. Apart from providing visibility to VMs, V-Ray can protect information completely, in physical or virtual environments.  “The technology provides unified data protection, deduplication, single-file recovery, automated protection and high ROI (about 70-80 percent saving on storage backup),” said Mohan.

The technology also claims to put an end to the time consuming and tedious traditional data recovery and backup process. For instance; if you have to recover an e-mail, you have to first recover the full virtual machine, then recover the exchange and mailbox and finally you can recover the mail that you were looking for. But V-Ray technology can see the mail in the catalogue and can immediately recover it. V-Ray is embedded in Symantec’s NetBackup and Backup Exec.