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28th Jul 2009

Managing Data Effectively in Virtual Environments

Server virtualization continues to gain major momentum in delivering a multitude of business benefits, including lowered total cost of ownership for servers, increased operational efficiency and higher server utilization. It also provides a cost-effective platform for ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery. According to Enterprise Strategy Group, accelerated adoption is expected, as current virtualization users indicate they plan to double the number of physical servers equipped for virtualization as well as increase the number of virtual machines running on those servers by 150 percent over the next several years.

Despite ongoing market traction and real-world benefits, virtualization also creates a whole new level of management complexity and challenges across the enterprise in the areas of data protection, storage and network consumption and IT infrastructure. In particular, organizations embracing virtualization also need to take into consideration unique data management and data protection issues.

Traditional methods of virtualization, for instance, are not able to cope with the increased server and data consolidation. Power, cost savings and efficiency gains may be overshadowed by inadequate data protection tools and faulty data management practices. By allowing one physical "box" to host dozens of virtual machines with their associated applications and data, virtualization limits server resources available for data protection, which can complicate storage infrastructure and network requirements.

Additionally, traditional agent-based backup is costly and does not work efficiently in a virtual environment. In addition, virtualization further complicates the task of protecting and recovering applications. Because these data protection challenges can dramatically increase the risk of data loss and service disruption, it's becoming increasingly important to understand why managing data becomes more complex in a virtualized environment as well as the ideal solution for easing and simplifying overall data management and protection.

Keeping up with Virtualized Data Demands
Keeping up with the demand for storage becomes increasingly difficult as data grows exponentially across physical and virtual environments. The resulting challenges include managing and retaining more data while consuming fewer storage resources and networks; tracking and managing redundant copies of data dispersed across physical and virtual environments; and managing expensive, primary data stores to minimize the cost of stale data. Meanwhile, off-host backup and granular recovery requires expensive storage systems that consume significant space and power.

Virtualized environments typically span multiple applications, storage systems and sites, which require a heterogeneous, end-to-end solution for simplifying data management across physical environments and disparate virtualized environments. The business risks of operating without a comprehensive data management solution include data loss; service interruptions; inability to recover data after a disaster; inefficient use of IT, server, network and storage resources; reduced performance and availability of applications and data; along with increased management, storage acquisition and licensing costs.

At the IT infrastructure level, the ease of allocating new virtual machines can create sprawling environments, hindering the discovery and protection of newly created virtual machines. As the number of virtual servers soars, data management tools have difficulty scaling and managing data protection policies and backup copies, which impacts risk management and operations.

Simplifying Data Management
The ideal solution will address the challenges in these critical areas in order to streamline the task of data management across physical and distributed virtualized environments. IT administrators need to rethink their approach to managing data in virtual environments, while at the same time ensuring that all of the data in the enterprise, whether in virtual or physical servers, use a consistent set of policies.

First, you need a comprehensive solution for efficiently and cost-effectively protecting data in a virtual server environment. Increasingly, enterprises deploying virtualization opt to offload backup operations from the virtual machines to a VMware VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup) Proxy server or to a Microsoft Hyper-V server to significantly reduce resource contention on physical servers while also eliminating costly backup agents on each virtual machine. You can perform file-level or full image-level backup using VMware VCB or Microsoft Hyper-V with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS).

However, full-image backups can consume excessive storage; lengthen the time it takes to perform backups, and require a long, two-step recovery process to restore the data to the original client. To meet today's demanding service level agreements (SLAs), you need to find the right balance between full virtual machine recovery and granular individual file recovery.

Second, you need a way to optimize your storage at rest and in-transit to improve retention and recovery, as well as to reduce network utilization. By identifying the redundant data in your environment while also leveraging advanced capabilities, such as deduplication, it's possible to transfer only changed blocks of data, enabling you to dramatically reduce primary and secondary storage costs and network use.

Unified Protection for Physical and Virtual Environments
Finally, you need a flexible IT infrastructure that enables you to protect and manage data across physical and sprawling virtual environments. With a simplified, unified data management approach, organizations can fully realize the benefits of virtualization while reducing complexity, cost and overhead and improving scalability and performance.

To overcome the challenges and complexity from exponential data growth and manage virtual environments more effectively, you need to reduce the risk of data loss and service disruption, optimize storage and network utilization, simplify the management of physical and virtual servers as well as implement a cost-effective data protection and disaster recovery strategy.

Source: Shaun Aquino (Virtual Strategy Magazine)