Bocada VPconnect Unites Physical, Virtual Monitoring

Data protection management vendor Bocada has introduced Bocada VPconnect , an integrated solution for managing virtual and physical data protection environments. The solution combines Bocada’s Vision module for virtual environments and Bocada’s Prism module for physical environments and correlates  all data protection results, something that Bocada’s CEO says is critical for MSPs’ need to keep costs down.

“Today we are bringing physical and data protection under one roof with VPconnect, a single solution for customers that need both,” CEO Nancy Hurley told MSPmentor.  VP connect enables the physical and virtual environments to be managed separately but monitored jointly, simplifying the job of IT.

By uniting the two for monitoring, VPconnect provides insight into how virtual machines are impacting the performance of the overall infrastructure, Hurley said.

“When you look at all cloud services, VMs are a critical piece of it,” she said. “But those break the whole data protection paradigm we are used to.  As you spin up a VM you’ve got to make sure it’s protected.  And in an MSP environment you also need to make sure you are keeping your costs down.”

Virtual environments can reduce the physical footprint for IT infrastructure but capacity costs to protect it can increase.  Bocada’s solution provides visibility into snapshots which will stay on the system forever and cripple the capacity of the infrastructure if you let it, Hurley said. Bocada’s solution provides the visibility that MSPs need monitor and optimize so capacity stays up.

Bocada’s solutions currently support VMware (Vision is integrated with vCenter) and VMware’s Data Recovery appliance; Quest’s vRanger Pro; Veeam’s Backup and Replication; Symantec NetBackup 7.1 and HP DataProtector (in beta).

In Q2 Bocada will add support for Symantec BackupExec 2012, Quest NetVault and NTAP SnapVault/SnapMirrpr.

The moves are big strides for Bocada, which just introduced Vision in November 2011.