The Five Fundamentals of Virtual Server Data Protection

The benefits of server virtualisation are compelling. From cost savings delivered through server consolidation or business flexibility and agility inherent in the emerging private and public cloud architectures, virtualisation technologies are rapidly becoming a cornerstone of the modern data centre.
However, the lure of virtual server deployments has led to some unintentional consequences for data storage and data protection. The consolidation of physical servers and networking is resulting in a massively converged IT infrastructure where already limited resources are being made even scarcer. Typical server consolidation ratios of 10 to 1 mean there are a fraction of the resources there once were for even routine IT management tasks like backup and recovery. In addition to fewer resources, massive data growth coupled with the expanding number of virtual machines is leading to an ever larger and more consolidated amount of data that must be managed and protected. The benefits of virtual servers in terms of cost savings, application flexibility and uptime are now driving customers to deploy more critical applications within a virtual machine context. These critical applications come with the most demanding SLAs for application uptime, granular recovery points, and rapid recovery times.

With this shift to virtualised data centres and round the clock operations, there is a real need to rethink traditional data protection techniques. Data protection and data recovery should have a minimal impact on the front end and cannot exclusively rely on the legacy methods of streaming copying data from the production to the backend. A modern, effective solution should minimise the load on production systems, reduce administrative effort, enhance data protection and recovery, ease the transition to a virtualised data centre, and will enable cloud-based options when they are desired.

So what are the fundamentals of Virtual Server Data Protection?
Exploding Backup Windows: The combination of high server consolidation and high virtual machine (VM) density concentrates data ownership to a small number of physical servers with most resources dedicated for production workloads. There are few resources, if any, left for traditional management tasks, such as backup, which moves data over a network during a fixed window. In this new world of consolidated and virtualised environments, storage and backup teams are being asked to protect large and growing data stores with a fraction of the compute, network and storage resources and to do so in less time.

As server resources continue to consolidate and virtual environments become more concentrated, the amount of data owned by virtual machines is skyrocketing. This massive growth in the amount of data to be owned, managed and protected by the virtual environment is compounding what is already an untenable situation when using a traditional streaming backup approach. Cases are emerging where a successful backup of multi-terabyte data stores using a traditional streamed backup approach is exceeding a 24-hour window, far in excess of what the modern data centre requires.

Unprotected Virtual Machine Data: The ease of deploying new VMs leads to a virtual machine sprawl, making it tedious and time consuming for administrators to keep track of new virtual machines and to ensure correct data protection and retention policies are applied to them. There is a major risk that important virtual machines may be created and never backed-up. Today, many administrators spend a significant part of their day tracking down new VMs and manually applying data protection policies. In the modern data centre with hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines, this manual approach to ensuring VM protection policies is simply an unacceptable solution.

Application Integration: As more and more mission critical applications – like SQL, Exchange and Oracle – are virtualised, it is necessary to provide the same level of protection and recovery capabilities for these applications as they had in a purely physical server setting, while staying within the constraints imposed by a highly consolidated, virtualised environment. The modern data centre now demands data protection solutions that deliver a level of application and virtualisation platform awareness in order to provide concerted backup and restore capabilities that will ensure maximum uptime of these critical applications.

Delivering Recovery Points: With high data growth and change rate, relying on last night’s backup for recovery is no longer sufficient. In addition, as organisations deploy more critical applications within a virtual server context, they are demanding Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) of hours. In other words, it is necessary to be able to recover to a few hours ago, not to last night’s backup, in order to minimise data loss and the impact to the organisation as a result of any disruption. Creating frequent recovery points without impacting production activity is a huge challenge.

Ensuring Restore Granularity: In order to further accelerate restores, organisations require an integrated approach to restoring data granularly at the volume, file or application object level. The ability to restore an individual email or file from within a virtual machine datastore is critical for ensuring application uptime and for meeting availability and uptime SLAs. Traditional approaches which require remounting an entire virtual machine datastore (such as a VMDK) and searching through the contents to find a single user email is simply too time-consuming and resource intensive to be a workable solution. Newer approaches are currently being introduced that enable file and object level restoration, however, they may require a second pass in order to generate that granular catalogue. This unnecessarily adds additional processing time and consequent risk into the data protection process. A solution is needed that delivers granular restore options down to the file or object level and does so from a single pass backup operation.
It’s clear then that if businesses want to reap the benefits of virtualisation, they must overcome the challenges of virtual server protection. The best way to do this is to approach it from a different direction and to modernise data protection and management, fast.