Originally posted by: Adam Young
The most significant aspect of any disaster recovery plan is the restoration of data. The hope is that you can restore the data to a state that mimics the most recent completed transaction or saved version. This requires a recovery 
point objective (RPO) generated by your data protection utility with a timestamp close after that transaction or version. The less data you recreate after any failure, the less time the recovery time objective (RTO) takes to get back up and running. Both the RPO and RTO are integral parts of any disaster recovery.
Virtualized environments bring different advantages to any recovery scenario in relation to RPOs and RTOs, like Change Block Tracking or Resilient Change Tracking, backing up at the virtualization layer and Snapshots.
There’s a game changing solution targeted for data protection of virtualized environments and utilizes these advantages: IBM Spectrum Protect Plus.
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus unlocks your data to provide value for emerging use cases. You can implement it as a stand-alone solution or integrate with IBM Spectrum Protect.
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus leverages application programming interfaces (APIs) and data copy technology from your hypervisors to create application data snapshots, for improved RPOs. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus creates and maintains a global catalog of all copies of VMs and files under protection, enabling an administrator to see what is protected—and more importantly, what isn’t. When the need to recover arises, this catalog enables administrators to quickly search for and identify what they want to recover instead of browsing through hundreds of objects and recovery points. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus enables instant access and restore from the catalog, so that an administrator can restore the organization’s operations in a matter of minutes.
This blog is part three of a series where we will focus on the following subjects:
How do you recover data or make data accessible for data re-use with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus? The answer lies in the easy-to-use interface and how to create a VMware Restore job.
The VMware restore jobs support Instant VM Restore and Instant Disk Restore scenarios, which are created automatically based on the selected source. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus automatically presents options, which provides instant writable access to data and application recovery points. An IBM Spectrum Protect Plus snapshot is mapped to a target server where it can be accessed, copied, or put immediately into production use, as needed.
To create a VMware Restore job definition, follow these steps:
1. From the navigation menu, expand Hypervisor, then VMware. Click Restore.
2. In the Restore pane, review the available recovery points of your VMware sources. Expand an entry in the Restore pane to view individual recovery points by date and timestamp.
3. Select recovery points and click the 'Add to Restore List' blue square icon to add the recovery point to the Restore List. Click the 'Remove from Restore List' red square icon to remove items from the Restore List.
4. To run the job now using default options, click Restore. To schedule the job to run using default options, click Manage Job(s) and define a trigger for the job definition.
5. To edit options before creating the job definition, click Options. Set the job definition options.
Destination
Set the VMware destination.
Original ESX Host or Cluster.
Alternate ESX Host or Cluster – This will be covered in a later blog post.
Restore Type
Set the VMware Restore job to run in Test, Production, or Clone mode by default. Once the job is created, it can be run in Production or Clone mode through the Job Sessions or Active Clones sections of the Restore pane.
For more detailed information on this VM restore process, specific Network Settings and Advanced Options, refer to the Spectrum Protect Users Guide here.
Click Save to save the policy options.
6. To run the job now, click Restore.
7. Once the job completes successfully, select one of the following options from the Actions:
Cleanup destroys the virtual machine and cleans up all associated resources.
Move to Production (vMotion) migrates the virtual machine through vMotion to the Production.
Clone (vMotion) migrates the virtual machine through vMotion to the Datastore and Virtual Network defined as the "Test" network.
For a video demonstration on this subject, click here.
Backups are stored as snapshot images, and that means you can recover data very quickly. There is no need to run a streaming restore that copies data from a target device. You just access backups directly and immediately from a simple mount point providing great RTOs.
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus recoveries can be used to restore operations in any data loss scenario, whether it’s a system locked by ransomware, inadvertent data deletion through human error, hardware failures, data corruption, or any of the other thousand ways you can lose critical data.
Because data copies can be created fast and frequent, you have multiple recovery points to give you better RPOs.
Traditional backup data can utilize as much as 10 times the amount of storage capacity as your primary storage. No longer can businesses afford to have this data sitting around and not be taking advantage of it. While data protection is the main use case for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, it’s more than just a backup solution. You can use it to derive 
significant business value. You can quickly and easily spin up virtual machines or mount VMDKs as read-write clones in fenced off networks safe from production. These can then be used for any situation where users need access to data. Examples of this are DR, test-dev, reporting or analytics. Because Spectrum Protect Plus is also enabled with a RESTful API, it can even be used as part of a DevOps workflow, helping to enhance modern, automated software development processes.
You can try a fully functional 30-day Trial Software model at the IBM Marketplace and get detailed documentation for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus in the IBM Knowledge Center.
In the next blog post, you will learn how to “Create a fenced network through a VMware Restore Job.”