Five tips to overcome back-up issues in virtual world

WASHINGTON, USA: With the rate of virtualized servers being added to IT environments, organizations are facing new challenges in how to adequately protect data and ensure its recoverability without back-up operations limiting the performance of the host machines. 

Despite advances in back-up and data protection technologies, the proliferation of virtual machines means that there is an increased need to align the business and IT requirements of data protection to achieve optimal efficiency, minimize risk and increase satisfaction to both users and the organization.

“There has been minimal attention paid by vendors in addressing the issues of back-up and restore success, performance, and capacity use in traditional back-up environments, let alone virtualized ones” said Ralph Wynn, product marketing manager, Bocada.  “By understanding how back-ups are being done within a virtualized environment, organizations will have a clearer path to overcome the inherent challenges they face in ensuring that VMs are properly protected and readily available if needed.

Bocada Inc., a provider of data protection management software, offer the following five tips to organizations looking to overcome the challenges of data protection in virtualized environments.

1. Planning and Internal communication is needed to ensure VM protection -

As organizations continue to increase the ratio of VMs to host machines, the challenges of back-up and recoverability in virtualized environments are only going to increase in scale. To prepare for growth, organizations that are adopting virtualization need to map out their back-up and recovery needs of those virtual machines.

Whether the back-up responsibilities fall on the same group that manages the virtual environment, or the roles are separate, a protection strategy needs to be put into place so that no data is overlooked.

Consistent communication is key, as new VMs can be deployed without the involvement of the back-up admin.

2. Track performance at all levels to identify bottlenecks -

Data protection of VMs introduces potential performance issues not seen when backing-up physical servers. Performance issues can occur at CPU, I/O and network levels and intensify as the number of VMs per host increase. While many management applications today show CPU and I/O performance, none do so with a lens on data protection activities, and therefore cannot tell the user if backups are impacting performance, or conversely if there will be enough resource available to perform back-ups.

Effectively tracking performance throughout the entire data protection service management process will give a better understanding of how bottlenecks might be preventing successful back-ups.

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3. Monitor and manage the amount of capacity being used by snapshots and back-ups -

Considering on average one third of all capacity consumed across an organization is used for data protection, effectively managing how much capacity snapshots and backups are consuming can potentially help reduce capacity use and capital costs.

Whether manually or with the help of a third-party solution, having accurate up to date knowledge of how your VMs consume storage and  how much capacity is being used by snapshots is vital. Having insight into snapshot utilization in every datastore down to the file level will help organizations determine what capacity can be reclaimed, freeing up resources.

4. Minimize additional administrative costs associated with protecting VMs —

While virtualization can help reduce the capital costs of servers and operational expenses of powering additional physical servers, there are some additional administrative costs associated with protecting VMs that organizations must be aware of for budget and operational planning purposes.

If an organization uses separate applications to protect virtual and physical servers, there may be an increased burden placed on the IT team. Managing multiple heterogeneous back-up applications has long been a challenge, even for specialized back-up groups within an organization.

As was mentioned in Tip #1, it is critical to map out which applications will be used to backup VMs and physical machines, and determine who is responsible for managing the backups. Often, multiple IT groups will use disparate data protection technologies to protect the same VM (the application team implements snapshots while the back-up team continues to back-up with a traditional solution, or even a specialized product integrated with the VM API).

This can result in overprotection which results in consuming excess capacity and makes it difficult to find the proper recovery point. Co-ordination among the teams can help reduce administrative costs and reduce time to recovery.

Simplifying the complexities of managing the disparate systems will help keep administrative costs to a minimum while capitalizing on current technology investments.

5. Implement a solution that addresses the specific needs of data protection management in virtual environments —

With virtualization back-up vendors focused on addressing the complexities of backing-up virtual instances, the ability to supply in-depth reporting and proper analysis on back-up success, recovery point availability, capacity consumption and performance issues have largely been ignored.

With protecting virtual instances becoming a top concern and the challenge of managing both snapshots and back-ups on the rise, a solution that addresses virtualization with an emphasis on the DPSM model can ensure operational excellence.