Best practices for protecting virtual servers final

© 2011 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited1©2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice

BEST PRACTICES FOR PROTECTING VIRTUAL SERVERSHP INFORM Webinar – July 12th

In cooperation with Forrester

Rachel Dines, Analyst, ForresterMike Peebles, Product Marketing,Data Protector software

© 2011 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited2 © 2009 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Best Practices For Protecting Virtual ServersRachel Dines, Analyst

July 12, 2011

© 2011 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited3

The backup challenge

Protecting virtual machines efficiently

Solving application protection headaches

Recommendations

Agenda


Backups cause headaches for IT...

Time-consuming– You must configure, schedule,

troubleshoot, and monitor backups.

Error-prone– Backup errors are common and

difficult to diagnose

Capital intensive– You must purchase backup

software, media servers, disk, & tape

Offsite tape vaulting exposes the company to the risk– You must encrypt tapes before they

go offsite


…And it’s not getting any easier

There is more data to back up than ever before– Storage growth between 30%-50%

Backup windows are shrinking– You can’t finish backups in time

Recovery demands are tougher– Users don’t want any data loss or

downtime

Your environment is changing– You’ll have a larger mix of virtual

and physical servers, OSes, DBs and apps


x86 server virtualization adoption

Base: 637 IT decisions makers at North American and European enterprises

“What are your firm’s plans to adopt x86 server virtualization?”

Source: Forrester's Technology Forrsights For Hardware, Q3 2010


Operating system adoption

Base: 616 server, storage, or data center decision-makers at North American and European enterprises with at least one x86 serverSource: Forrester's Technology Forrsights For Hardware, Q3 2010

75% Windows,25% non-Windows!


To compete, enterprises are adopting more and more new applications . . .

Source: Enterprise And SMB Software Survey, North America And Europe, Q4 2009

Base: 455 packaged application software decision-makers at North American and European enterprises


Application integration

OS

Database

Collaboration

Business intelligence/

analytical applications

Application development

tools

Hardware platform

Applications

Services

Storage Security

Network and systems management

IDS

Content Filtering

Management

AV/Spyware

Anti-Spam

Identity Management

Regulatory ComplianceManagement Vendors

Provisioning

Firewalls

FS Applications

Computer Network Storage

Vulnerability Assessment

MonitoringGrid

A Fortune 500 financial institution

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“How much data/information does your firm currently maintain for server backups for disaster recovery and continuity?”

Enterprise backup environments are measured in the hundreds of terabytes

Base: 649 server, storage, or data center decision-makers at North American and European enterprises



Data growth continues“What do you expect will be the overall storage growth at your company over the

next 12 months?”

Base: 351 server, storage, or data center decision-makers at North American and European enterprises



Why the information explosion?

Retention requirements

Compliance

Litigation

Fear of deletion

Backups are retained for longer than necessary

Application data growth

Systems for rich digital content

Virtual images


The five-year growth of 100 terabytes

Source: The February 2010 “Controlling Storage Cost Amid High Growth” Forrester report

In 5 years 100 TB of production storage

turns into almost 3 PB!


New pressures driving increased uptime

Accountability

Cost of downtime

Increased customer expectations

Supplier expectations

Employee expectations

Competitive advantage


Today’s backup challenge

Capacity requirements are still growing 30%-

50% per year

Business owners have less and less tolerance for any

data loss

More and more companies operate

close to 24 X 7





Recommendations

Agenda


Backup is a top challenge in the virtual server environment

Base: 104 vendor and user companies that currently use virtualization technology in the x86 server environments

Source: September 2010 Global Virtual Server Environments Online Survey


Virtual machine backup challenge

As you increase the ratio of VMs to physical host, you will not have enough CPU and bandwidth to backup all the VMs at the same time.

You also likely don’t want to pay for, deploy and manage a backup agent in each VM

Backup admins don’t always know when new VMs have been deployed so they don’t get protected

Virtual servers

Physical servers


VMware backup options

1. Deploy one backup agent in each VM• Provides the ability to restore individual VMs as well as application awareness

and granular object recovery• Costly, slow, lots of processing overhead• Doesn’t protect vmdk, can’t restore an entire VM

2. Deploy one backup agent per ESX host• Protects the entire ESX host including vmdks, can restore entire VMs• Less costly (if using agent-based licensing)• No granular recovery of individual VMs or objects

3. Use VMware vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP)• Supported by most major backup application vendors with native GUI

integration• Agent-less with no processing on the host• Granular restore and full VM restore

4. Use specialized VM backup products• Typically agent-less with no processing on the host• Designed specifically to backup VMware• Separate point product

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VMware backup options (cont.)

5. Use a backup application with source deduplication• Deduplicates data (block-level) at the source (on the ESX host) before backup

– Less data to backup and transmit– Also saves capacity on the back-end

• Application awareness, granular restore capabilities• Does require software/agent in each VM, additional overhead on host

6. Use storage-based snapshots• Increasing application awareness and integration• Provides multiple PIT copies (some vendors offer unlimited snapshots)• Space efficient snapshots reduce capacity overhead (25%-30%) • Snapshot technology is increasingly included the cost of storage or bundled

with other feature sets• Combine with replication for a DR solution• Can be controlled through backup platforms• Requires central storage (SAN/NAS)

+

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+_

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Most companies are still backing up VMs inefficiently

Base: 104 vendor and user companies that currently use virtualization technology in the x86 server environments

Source: September 2010 Global Virtual Server Environments Online Survey


Demystifying vStorage API for Data Protection

Myth: I need additional production storage capacity to support VADPFact: VADP takes a off-host snapshot so it does not impact your production storage capacity or performance

Myth: VADP will take too long to deployFact: VADP is a native feature in most enterprise backup solutions and is easily enabled in the software. Many backup solutions will even auto-discover virtual machines for you

Myth: VADP can’t provide granular restores of individual files or objectsFact: Nope, that was VADP’s predecessor, VMware Consolidated Backup, that required deploying guest-level agents in order to get granular file restore





Recommendations

Agenda


The benefits of application-aware backup agents

Ensure application consistency and get recoverable backupsAgents with application knowledge can

quiesce the application to make sure a consistent backup is taken that will be easily recoverable

Mitigate the disruption to the applications

Application aware agents can run the backup process in the background, or even move processing off the host to lessen the performance impact of the backups

Shorten backup windows

Application-aware agents can oftentimes complete backups faster than generic agents


What to look for in an application specific agent

Granular recovery capabilities

– Single files, emails, records, SharePoint sites

Administrator/end-user self service

– Empower administrator to do their own restore with a native GUI in the application

Support for your version/the most current version of the application

– i.e., SharePoint 2010 and 2007

Support for snapshot assisted backups

– The ability to do the backup by calling an array-based snapshot


Common application-aware agents offered by backup vendors


Exchange backup and recovery options

Backup Storage solutions

Pros

•Relatively inexpensive, backup to tape or to disk

•Improving features (i.e. granular mailbox and mail recovery)

•RTO/RPO measured in minutes or seconds

•Multiple snapshots provide for PIT copies

•Storage vendors have increasing application awareness

•Cost of storage is declining, many vendors no longer charge for snap licenses

Cons •RTO/RPO measured in hours •Requires the deployment of a central storage (SAN or NAS)

Guidance

•Appropriate for Exchange environments, where RPO and RTO take a back seat to budget concerns or availability. In addition, all companies should complement the other solutions with backup for backup version history.

•If you already have or plan to deploy central storage this is a good option





Recommendations

Agenda


• Identify your “trouble” applications like Exchange, SharePoint, Oracle, DB2 etc. and evaluate backup providers with strengths in these areas

• For VMware and Exchange, the enterprise-class backup vendors have caught up with the point solutions in terms of capabilities—no need for additional point products to be deployed

• For additional gaps in protection, VMware-aware snapshots are a good alternative—especially if you can catalog the snaps in your backup application

Avoid point products for protecting specific applications

© 2009 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Thank you

Rachel Dines+1 [email protected]@RachelDinesBlogs.forrester.com/rachel_dines

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Advanced protection for virtual environmentsData Protector software 6.2

Mike PeeblesProduct MarketingData Protector software

HP Data Protector software 6.2

Simplifying application protection through un if ied recover y and advanced automation

• Broad hypervisor support

• Down-to-the-second snapshot recovery for VMware and Hyper-V on HP and non-HP arrays

• Unique VMware single item recovery solution

• One agent for VMware and Hyper-V– Long-standing tradition of one agent, multiple applications

– Simplify installation and use (API-level integration)

• VMware vSphere 4.x (vSphere)– Incremental, differential, change block tracking

– GUI integration for vStorage API backup

– VMware Ready Certified

Leading integration in virtual environmentsHP Virtual Environment Integration Agent

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