Transcript
Page 1: Backup for Virtual Environments

an Storage eBookINFOSTOR®

Backup for Virtual Environments

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2 End-User Survey: Virtual Server Backup and Recovery

3 Backing Up Virtual Servers is Tougher Than You Think

5 Boosting Storage Backup Speed in a Virtual Environment

7 Financial Giant Uses Deduplication to Reduce Virtual Storage Costs

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This content was adapted from the Infostor, Enterprise IT Planet and Enterprise Storage Forum websites. Contributors: Dave Simpson, Drew Robb and Richard Adhikari.

Backup for Virtual Environments

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Backup for Virtual Environments

survey of 500 CIOs, commissioned by Veeam Software and conducted by Vanson Bourne, reveals some interesting trends in the virtual server space, specifically on the

backup and recovery practices of IT organizations. For example, penetration of virtual servers is now approaching 50 percent in IT infrastructures (currently 42 percent), and since CIOs on average consider half of their servers to be “mission critical,” that means that virtual servers are poised to penetrate mission-critical applications. And the 42 percent penetration today is expected to grow to 63 percent in the next two years. The No. 1 reason that IT organizations virtualize is to consolidate physical servers (71 percent), followed by improved disaster recovery (54 percent) and improved data protection (51 percent). Yet one of the primary gating factors to end-user adoption of virtual servers centers on fears relating to the ability to successfully back up and recover virtual machines (VMs). In fact, 44 percent of the survey respondents said that concerns regarding VM backup and recovery prevented them from virtualizing mission-critical workloads. (The survey breaks out responses by region – US, UK, France and Germany – but the numbers cited in this article refer to total percentages.) Not surprisingly, VMware vSphere is the leading virtual server platform (73 percent), followed by Microsoft Hyper-V (28 percent) and Citrix Xen (27 percent). The penetration of both Hyper-V and Xen is expected to increase to 30 percent over the next 12 months. What is surprising is that administrators are only backing up, on average, 68 percent of their virtual environments,

and only 29 percent of IT organizations back up their entire “virtual estate.” Similarly, on average, backup tests are performed only once every two months (which translates into potentially 60 days of bad backups), and only 2 percent of all backups are tested annually.

End-User Survey: Virtual Server Backup and RecoveryBy Dave Simpson

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erver virtualization is a promising cost-cutting technology that is sure to continue growing in the current economic climate, but backing up and restoring virtual servers could prove

difficult because of the extensive use of scripting. Most businesses use VMware products, as the company is the market leader, and its VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) centralized backup facility requires users to write a lot of scripts. That makes it difficult to use, according to some experts. “There are lots of different ways to back things up, and VMware basically leaves it up to the users,” said Robert Bloomquist, senior engineer for virtual recovery at Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery, which specializes in restoring lost data. VMware says extensive scripting is only necessary if enterprises using VCB don’t already have a backup solution in place, as VCB was designed to work with existing backup systems, but at least one vendor of a backup solution for VMware’s products disagrees. “It’s difficult to just use the VCB framework because you have to write a lot of scripts and requires a lot of maintenance, and you have to spend a lot of time on that,” said Ellen Rome, vice president of sales and marketing at backup, archiving and disaster solutions vendor STORserver. “That just adds another level of management to the process.” Many companies leave out some of their virtualized systems in their disaster recovery plans because there

are no tools to manage them, according to surveys by Symantec. Lena Joshi, a senior product marketing manager at VMware, said VCB was designed so that its partners could provide solutions based on the technology and that it works with existing backup systems.

“Philosophically, it’s all about our ecosystem,” she said. VMware is known for its strong ties with third-party vendors, although Microsoft’s push into the virtualization field with Hyper-V is threatening that ecosystem. “VCB is a framework that provides access more than anything else.” Joshi said VCB was designed to work with customers’ existing backup products, giving them direct access to data in virtual machines in shared storage networks. “You’ll have to write

scripts if you don’t already have a backup solution,” she said. However, STORserver’s Rome said it may not be as easy to use VCB with existing backup solutions as VMware claims. “VCB is really just a framework, it’s not something that’s easy to use and implement,” Rome said. “You have to do the integration to make it work with a lot of the popular backup solutions out there.” Tools from traditional legacy backup systems vendors such as CA, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Symantec,

Backing Up Virtual Servers is Tougher Than You ThinkBy Richard Adhikari

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which have extended their applications to the virtual environment, will not provide an adequate solution, claims George Pradel, director of strategic alliances at Vizioncore, which provides backup and recovery products for the VMware environment. “The procedures in traditional legacy applications have not been modified for the extra capabilities you have in the virtual environment,” Pradel said. “You need a different approach.” While storage vendors have made strides to adapt their backup offerings to virtualization, it’s clear that enterprises moving to virtual environments must re-think their data backup and recovery infrastructure.

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EMC PRESENTS

EMC2, EMC, and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.© Copyright 2011 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Source: IDC Worldwide Purpose Built Backup Appliance 2010-2015 Market Analysis and Forecast, 2010 Vendor Shares report (May 2011).

“Discover the Power of Next Generation Backup”

See why EMC is the leader in backup and recovery at www.EMC.com/transformbackup.

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ackups used to be simple. Attach a disk array to a tape drive and away you went. Then the volume of data mushroomed, and things got a little bit more complicated. Now, with so

many virtualized systems to deal with, backups can be problematic. At professional engineering firm Wade Trim, for example, the move to a virtualized environment resulted in severe backup slows. According to Scott Landrum, senior network administrator at the company, the backup window at one of its data centers stretched from 14 hours prior to virtualization to three full days. “Backup throughput dropped from 2,000 Mb/minute to 400 Mb/min,” said Landrum of Wade Trim, a 350-employee firm headquartered in Detroit with a total of 21 offices in eight states. As well as engineering, it provides planning, landscape architecture, operations, surveying and environmental science services. Wade Trim was backing up 14 TB of Windows data throughout the enterprise. In addition to the office’s files, the company had to backup lots of large CAD, GIS and image files. Two-thirds of the data sat on 25 Windows servers and a SAN at the head office. The company had three trays of CX-3 disks served by two SAN switches. At this location, everything was backed up onto a Dell PowerVault TL4000 tape library. As local branches generally

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Boosting Storage Backup Speed in a Virtual Environment

By Drew Robb

B had only one or two Windows servers, data was being backed up onto much smaller Dell PowerVault tape libraries. A Bump in the Road Things started to go awry in the backup department, however, when the company began to march forward with its virtualization plans using Windows Hyper-V, first in its Detroit and Tampa locations. While the traditional

gains from virtualization were experienced (e.g., better IT efficiency, server consolidation), its backup processes took a severe hit. The company was running differential and full backups. But after virtualization, the throughput choked down to a fifth of its previous levels. Full backups took days to complete. “What I needed was the ability to backup virtual hard disks (VHD) faster, while still being able to conduct file and folder level restores,” Landrum said.

He looked at various solutions, such as VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) and VMware ESX, but these required heavy Linux scripting, additional hardware and the move to a different virtualization platform. The decision was made to stick with Hyper-V, as it was doing a good job on the virtualization side. That left the selection process between two main backup candidates — Symantec Backup Exec and CA ARCserve backup, which was the product already in use at Wade Trim.

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without downtime and without heavy involvement from IT staff. “Instead of spending weeks rearchitecting our entire infrastructure, we were able to deal with a couple of remote locations per weekend,” said Landrum. “We are most of the way through the transition to virtualization, and our users haven’t noticed we are doing it.” The lengthy extension of the backup window has also been resolved. According to Landrum, the time needed for a full backup has dropped from 72 hours to about eight, as compared to 14 hours prior to virtualization. Whereas backup throughput had crashed from 2000 Mb/min to 400 Mb/min, it has now surged to 4,000 Mb/min.

“Backup throughput is now twice what we experienced prior to virtualization,” said Landrum “Once we are complete with our virtualization initiative, we plan on investigating other capabilities, such as replication and deduplication.”

The Solution ARCserve had been used for backup for about 10 years. CA suggested an upgrade to ARCserve Backup 12.5, which included a new virtualization agent that addresses backup complexity and slowdowns. It came out on top during product evaluation, particularly as far as licensing costs. According to Landrum, the Symantec product would cost $3,000 per location to license compared to about $800 for ARCserve. “We didn’t see any reason to retool our entire backup fabric,” he said. “Further, we could use ARCserve as a core component to migrate our remote offices from a physical to a virtual platform.” He explained that the company was engaged in a project to conduct a physical to virtual conversion of the primary production file server at each remote location. To facilitate this project, ARCserve could be used for conversion-related tasks in such a way that local offices could be moved to the virtual world over weekends

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segment of the financial services industry. Based in London, but with global operations, the data center of SunGard Financial Services uses EMC Clariion and Celerra arrays in its SAN. It currently has 1,500 virtual machines (VMs) distributed across eight sites. Most of these VMs operate in a development and test environment. When it came to backing them, the inadequacies of VCB meant that priorities had to be

set. Those VMs operating in a mission-critical production setting were always backed up. Those in development and testing, however, were not. Chapman describes a “kit of parts” being needed to build VCB backup. Despite a lot of attention, backup jobs would fail. This situation was exacerbated by a distributed infrastructure. Many smaller sites existed throughout London, and each business unit ran its own backup and DR plan. The company

engaged in a metropolitan consolidation project to get rid of most of the small sites, focus IT operations at a large data center at Canary Wharf in London, and centralize backup. “We needed to provide a reliable and consistent protection strategy for our virtual and physical real estate,” said Chapman. “Our three tape silos were unable to complete backups on time.” With more than 190 TB of data at the front end, SunGard

Financial Giant Uses Deduplicationto Reduce Virtual Storage Costs

By Drew Robb

continued

unGard Financial Services was experiencing backup woes in its highly virtualized environment. Using tape along with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) and Symantec

Backup Exec was proving problematic. “We didn’t have enough tape bandwidth to complete large backups and were experiencing high rates of backup failure,” said Guy Chapman, a senior engineer for storage and virtual infrastructure at SunGard Financial Services, which is based in London. The company looked at various options as an alternative to tape, including storing data on SATA disks within a SAN. Eventually, however, it switched to EMC Data Domain for deduplication and Symantec NetBackup software. Some backup remains on tape, but much of it has switched to the Data Domain appliance. “Data Domain-based deduplication worked out at about one fifth of the cost of SATA/SAN storage,” said Chapman. “We have also reduced our backup and recovery costs per VM [virtual machine] by 10 times.” SunGard Financial Services is one of the four business units of SunGard. While SunGard Availability Services is perhaps better known due to its disaster recovery services, SunGard Financial Services is actually a larger revenue generator. It contributes more than 50 percent of the annual $5 billion-plus of SunGard by delivering software and IT services to institutions in virtually every

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Financial Services looked at how to back all this up and replicate it to a recovery site without breaking the bank. That led the company to deduplication as a means of reducing the volume of data that needed to be stored. Dedupe works by a) preventing duplicate files from being backed up and b) storing only one copy of everything rather than conducting a full backup on a daily or weekly basis. The two final dedupe candidates were EMC Data Domain and Symantec PureDisk. The latter was priced attractively if purchased with Symantec NetBackup. However, Chapman said it has relatively high associated hardware costs — five media servers — as well as power and cooling demands, and the need for more back-end storage to support it. “Data Domain met our business requirements and could easily be implemented into our environment,” he said. “The reference calls we made were positive and the technical presales contacts were excellent.” In terms of results, the company has been able to squeeze 190 TB at the front end to only 14 TB on a Data Domain appliance using NetBackup software. New incoming data achieves compression rates of 20 to one.

Tape, though, continues to be used as a long-term archive. It has been eliminated for offsite backup. Instead, the company placed another Data Domain appliance at an offsite facility and replicates its data to it. “We now have fast reliable recovery of replicated data,” said Chapman. Another benefit is nearline storage of VMs. Many VMs in test and development are used for only a short while, yet they can take a long time to configure. While some might never be needed again, it is smart to keep them around just in case. But this requires a lot of storage. SunGard now puts them on the Data Domain box and can bring them back into use rapidly without clogging up primary storage with unused VMs. This works out at about one tenth the cost of storing those VMs on primary disk. “We have full confidence in the backup and security of or virtual infrastructure,” said Chapman. “The time savings of implementing deduplication are equivalent to one full-time employee due to the elimination of so much backup administration and troubleshooting.”


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