Virtualisation, cloud bog DR mechanism: Symantec

BANGALORE, INDIA: We have been reading a lot on how virtualization and cloud, two of the most hyped technologies of the decade, have benefited businesses in bringing down their overall infrastructure expenditure.

However, on the other hand, not many know that the same trend has led several to stake their disaster recovery mechanisms.

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According to Anand Naik, director, Systems Engineering, Symantec, though virtualization and cloud are the most talked of technologies in enterprises today that is being deployed for critical applications, the company has found that these two technologies are adding up complexities to disaster recovery scenario.

He was sharing India-specific results of Symantec's sixth annual disaster recovery survey, where it surveyed 150+ large Indian enterprises, to CIOL in an exclusive interview.

As per the survey, most of the enterprises have today deployed some or the other form of virtualization for their critical applications. However, only 50 per cent of the virtual data is being regularly backed-up in these enterprises.

The percentage is low owing to several reasons ranging from policies, lack of resources, tools, to even the trend that many are jumping into cloud or virtualisation space just for the sake of  it, and irrespective of whether or not they have the required infrastructure in place.

“Though virtualization have been there in the industry for quite sometime now, cloud per say, especially from back-up or disaster recovery perspective, is a new phenomenon that we are hearing only for the past 12-15 months. People are still in the evaluation stage,” he noted.

Almost 70 per cent reported that different tools for virtual and physical environments is a major challenge for them. With regard to backing-up on cloud, almost 25 per cent seem to be in the consideration or planning phase; however, lack capabilities as of today. Whereas, 40 per cent of the enterprises, though have the capabilities, are yet to implement it and almost 15 per cent are still undecided on whether or not to implement it.

As per the survey, it is just a mere 20 per cent of the lot who have implemented it and are backing up data using cloud storage environment.

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"Backing up data in a virtual environment is different from that of a physical environment. A lot of customers are fine tuning their policies, environments to ensure that virtual environment is also taken into the overall policy, along with physical environment, to back-up data," adds Naik.

Now what makes backing up data in physical environment different as well as difficult from that of a virtual environment? The expert gives his view:

In a physical environment, all resources which are required to back up data or to restore data are available in a particular server.

The resources such as adapters, which are required to transfer data to a storage subsystem to storage area network or a direct attached storage or a network attached storage, or management tools are available within that storage environment, in order  to ensure that back-up on tape environment is done for that particular client.

Whereas, in a virtual environment all these resources, whether it is storage or adapters or OS itself, are shared with multiple virtual servers that are running on top of it. And each of these virtual servers may run different operating systems, also called guest OSs, for all.

Moreover, each of these virtual OSs will have to go into virtual layers and talk to the underlying physical layer and ensure that relevant data is taken care in such a way that the particular application or system wants it to be. SO it is even more difficult.

“Mission-critical data has to be treated in the same fashion, irrespective of whether it is in physical or virtual or cloud environment. Moreover, enterprises should have integrated set of tools and policies that can cut across these three areas, to save time on deployment, troubleshooting, etc., avers Naik.

“Most of all, use technologies such as de-duplication, replication, thin provisioning so as to back-up only the relevant data,” Naik signs off.