Managing Data Effectively in Virtual Environments

Server virtualization continues to gain major momentum in delivering a multitude of business benefits, including lowered total cost of ownership for servers, increased operational efficiency and higher server utilization. It also provides a cost-effective platform for ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery. According to Enterprise Strategy Group, accelerated adoption is expected, as current virtualization users indicate they plan to double the number of physical servers equipped for virtualization as well as increase the number of virtual machines running on those servers by 150 percent over the next several years.

Despite ongoing market traction and real-world benefits, virtualization also creates a whole new level of management complexity and challenges across the enterprise in the areas of data protection, storage and network consumption and IT infrastructure. In particular, organizations embracing virtualization also need to take into consideration unique data management and data protection issues.

Traditional methods of virtualization, for instance, are not able to cope with the increased server and data consolidation. Power, cost savings and efficiency gains may be overshadowed by inadequate data protection tools and faulty data management practices. By allowing one physical "box" to host dozens of virtual machines with their associated applications and data, virtualization limits server resources available for data protection, which can complicate storage infrastructure and network requirements.

Additionally, traditional agent-based backup is costly and does not work efficiently in a virtual environment. In addition, virtualization further complicates the task of protecting and recovering applications. Because these data protection challenges can dramatically increase the risk of data loss and service disruption, it's becoming increasingly important to understand why managing data becomes more complex in a virtualized environment as well as the ideal solution for easing and simplifying overall data management and protection.

Keeping up with Virtualized Data Demands

Keeping up with the demand for storage becomes increasingly difficult as data grows exponentially across physical and virtual environments. The resulting challenges include managing and retaining more data while consuming fewer storage resources and networks; tracking and managing redundant copies of data dispersed across physical and virtual environments; and managing expensive, primary data stores to minimize the cost of stale data. Meanwhile, off-host backup and granular recovery requires expensive storage systems that consume significant space and power.

Virtualized environments typically span multiple applications, storage systems and sites, which require a heterogeneous, end-to-end solution for simplifying data management across physical environments and disparate virtualized environments. The business risks of operating without a comprehensive data management solution include data loss; service interruptions; inability to recover data after a disaster; inefficient use of IT, server, network and storage resources; reduced performance and availability of applications and data; along with increased management, storage acquisition and licensing costs.

At the IT infrastructure level, the ease of allocating new virtual machines can create sprawling environments, hindering the discovery and protection of newly created virtual machines. As the number of virtual servers soars, data management tools have difficulty scaling and managing data protection policies and backup copies, which impacts risk management and operations.

Simplifying Data Management