Middle East enterprises should understand fundamentals of virtual server data protection

DUBAI, UAE: The benefits of server virtualization are compelling and are driving the transition to large scale virtual server deployments across Middle East enterprises.

From cost savings to server consolidation or business flexibility and agility inherent in the emergent private and public cloud architectures, virtualization technologies are rapidly becoming a cornerstone of the modern data center.

Allen Mitchell, senior Technical Account Manager, MENA at CommVault Systems says that the lure of virtual server deployments is having unintended 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 virtualized data centers and round the clock operations, there is a need to rethink the traditional data protection techniques. Data protection and data recovery must have minimal front end impact and cannot exclusively rely on the legacy methods of streaming copying data from the production to the backend.

A modern, effective solution minimizes the load on production systems, reduces administrative effort, enhances data protection and recovery, eases the transition to a virtualized data center, and will enable cloud-based options when they are desired.