For a CIO and his/her implementation team on the journey to the private cloud, there is nothing more stress relieving (okay, except maybe for a week on a Caribbean island) than being able to meet or even exceed your SLAs without having to do all the heavy IT lifting yourself.
No need for you to choose what servers are the best for your compute needs, no need to think about which network interface you should use to get your bits and bytes of data flying quickly in and across your data center and definitely no need to figure out what type of storage you need to support your environment and keep it up and running 24×7. It’s all been taken care of for you!
Well, that’s the premise behind the Vblock integrated infrastructure package from VMware, Cisco and EMC – offered by the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Company. And it holds true to this promise. But what about once everything is implemented? More specifically, what about backup and recovery? While the initial thinking may be to try to extend legacy backup solutions to the Vblock environment, there are better approaches – ones that are more efficient and, yes, sustainable (environmentally pleasing and scalable). You just have to think out of the box, and I know this can be difficult to do for a number of reasons (e.g., budget, uncertainty, learning new methodologies, etc.).
The key issue with trying to apply traditional backup approaches to this type of environment is that they simply weren’t architected for today’s virtualized world. To quote Sid Waddell at the BBC: “It’s like trying to stop a water buffalo with a pea-shooter.” You will just get trampled in the end. Okay, well, maybe trampled is a bit extreme, but it is not going to be easy and there will be consequences for your business.
Vblock speaks virtualization, so the backup solution you use needs to too. It needs to speak in terms of virtual machines and .vmdks, and not in collections of files. It needs to have a user interface VMware that administrators can feel right at home in (not look tape backup interfaces of years past), and like the Vblock package itself, the backup solution should be easy to manage and deploy. Purpose-built backup appliances (PBBAs) are great here because they, like the vBlock, are optimized to be implemented in a stress-free manner while assuring optimized operation throughout the solution.
Over the course of the next few blog posts in this series, I will explore Vblock backup in much greater detail – how to implement, how to ensure recoverability and optimize Vblock disaster recovery scenarios. Until then, I encourage you to check out the EMC webcast – Blazing Fast VMware Backup & Recovery with EMC Avamar. I, along with EMC Avamar Product Marketing Manager Phil George, take a look at optimizing backup and recovery in VMware environments, including Vblock
by Alex Almeida
For a CIO and his/her implementation team on the journey to the private cloud, there is nothing more stress relieving (okay, except maybe for a week on a Caribbean island) than being able to meet or even exceed your SLAs without having to do all the heavy IT lifting yourself.
No need for you to choose what servers are the best for your compute needs, no need to think about which network interface you should use to get your bits and bytes of data flying quickly in and across your data center and definitely no need to figure out what type of storage you need to support your environment and keep it up and running 24×7. It’s all been taken care of for you!
Well, that’s the premise behind the Vblock integrated infrastructure package from VMware, Cisco and EMC – offered by the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Company. And it holds true to this promise. But what about once everything is implemented? More specifically, what about backup and recovery? While the initial thinking may be to try to extend legacy backup solutions to the Vblock environment, there are better approaches – ones that are more efficient and, yes, sustainable (environmentally pleasing and scalable). You just have to think out of the box, and I know this can be difficult to do for a number of reasons (e.g., budget, uncertainty, learning new methodologies, etc.).
The key issue with trying to apply traditional backup approaches to this type of environment is that they simply weren’t architected for today’s virtualized world. To quote Sid Waddell at the BBC: “It’s like trying to stop a water buffalo with a pea-shooter.” You will just get trampled in the end. Okay, well, maybe trampled is a bit extreme, but it is not going to be easy and there will be consequences for your business.
Vblock speaks virtualization, so the backup solution you use needs to too. It needs to speak in terms of virtual machines and .vmdks, and not in collections of files. It needs to have a user interface VMware that administrators can feel right at home in (not look tape backup interfaces of years past), and like the Vblock package itself, the backup solution should be easy to manage and deploy. Purpose-built backup appliances (PBBAs) are great here because they, like the vBlock, are optimized to be implemented in a stress-free manner while assuring optimized operation throughout the solution.
Over the course of the next few blog posts in this series, I will explore Vblock backup in much greater detail – how to implement, how to ensure recoverability and optimize Vblock disaster recovery scenarios. Until then, I encourage you to check out the EMC webcast – Blazing Fast VMware Backup & Recovery with EMC Avamar. I, along with EMC Avamar Product Marketing Manager Phil George, take a look at optimizing backup and recovery in VMware environments, including Vblock