Modernizing Backup & Recovery in a Virtual World

Companies easily get started with server virtualization – typically internal IT applications. Having tasted the obvious benefits, they quickly embark upon a broader project – virtualizing as many servers and business applications as possible. And then they hit a wall; virtual server sprawl makes their infrastructure hard to manage; bottlenecks spring up due to resource contention; and backup windows can no longer be met. The solution is innovation – better management and more robust backup and recovery processes that are designed specifically for today’s IT landscape.

“Data protection paradigms and architectures (especially backup and recovery) must change in order to adapt to virtualized environments.” IDC's Worldwide Storage for the Virtualized Environment Taxonomy, 2009, December 2009.

The specifics of that change are the subject of this article.

Navigating the Three Phases of Virtualization

There are three primary phases of virtualization. The first stage is known as IT Production. The IT department deploys virtualization for internal applications such as web servers and caching appliances. While important, these areas could not be classified as mission critical. The aim for IT is to use virtualization to enhance cost efficiency. In this phase, virtualization rates range anywhere from 0% to 30%.

Phase 2 can be characterized as Business Production. At this stage, the goal is to align virtualization of IT resources to business goals. Instead of just making IT more efficient, the intention here is to extend those efficiencies into the organization as a whole by streamlining business processes. By this point, virtualization ranges from 30% to 70% and companies realize that a traditional approach to backup and recovery is no longer enough.

Phase 3, known as IT as a Service (ITaaS), is where true business agility is unleashed. The organization achieves the greatest possible gains from virtualization by reason of optimized processes, low transactional latencies and IT cost efficiency. However, this can only occur once organizations have passed the 70% virtualization mark and have adopted a next-generation approach to backup and recovery.

Hitting the Wall with Traditional Backup Processes

Organizations in the midst of the second phase sooner or later arrive at the same conclusion: greater levels of virtualization are accompanied with mushrooming data protection needs. Why? Under the old physical world paradigm, backup was done on a series of servers, each of which was relatively poorly utilized in terms of CPU, RAM and disk space. Consequently, abundant resources existed with which to accomplish timely backups. CPU’s could spend most of the night solely on backup processes. As long as organizational applications were ready at the start of the next day, the business was unaffected.