Simplified Business Continuity with VMware Virtual
Infrastructure and Data Domain Deduplication Storage

Business Continuity Challenges

Reliable business continuity must be supported by a comprehensive approach to data backup, recovery and offsite disaster recovery. Faced with budget constraints and limited options for moving data offsite, most organizations have compromised their business continuity preparedness. For these organizations, a site outage or system failure can significantly disrupt business operations—and even put the organization out of business.

Common business continuity challenges include:

  • High costs. Many business continuity solutions require a significant investment in additional hardware, software and services. Disaster recovery plans in particular often require duplicate data center infrastructure, resulting in a proliferation of costly, underutilized servers.
  • Failure to meet recovery point and recovery time objectives. Heavy dependence on tape-based strategies for moving data offsite raises costs while lowering service levels. The recovery point can only be as good as the last tape rotation, while the time required to stream data from tape is unnecessarily long.
  • Overly complex and unreliable solutions. Managing rapid system rebuilds, tracking tape media, and managing complex recovery is beyond the capability of most tape-based disaster recovery approaches.

Benefits of VMware Virtual Infrastructure and Data Domain Deduplication Storage

Organizations using VMware virtual infrastructure to improve the DR components of their business continuity plans have realized many benefits:

  • Reduced downtime. Organizations can eliminate much of their planned downtime and reduce unplanned downtime, including dramatic reductions in point-of-recovery and time-to-recovery for disaster scenarios.
  • Lower costs. Virtual infrastructure makes it possible for companies to reduce costs by slashing the need for additional hardware and specialized software.
  • Simplified processes. Virtual infrastructure removes the complexity of maintaining duplicate physical systems for disaster recovery. It also eliminates and streamlines much of the recovery process.

Extending the value of server consolidation to data and storage just makes sense. Data Domain deduplication storage can help users attain additional efficiencies:

  • Longer retention. Operational recoveries are executed from disk, not tape, for fast, simple and reliable recovery.
  • Network-efficient replication. Deduplicated data is easily moved over the WAN to a disaster recovery site using 99% less bandwidth.
  • Storage consolidation. Eliminate redundant data found in the backups of virtual machines and simplify the protection of remote sites across the distributed enterprise.

Lowering Disaster Recovery Costs with Virtual Systems Infrastructure and Data Domain Deduplication Storage

VMware virtual machines are hardware-independent, meaning that any physical server can serve as a recovery target for any virtual machine. As a result organizations can significantly reduce the cost of hardware for application recovery by using existing servers for recovery targets and disaster recovery testing. Many organizations have realized significant reduction in capital budget expenditures by provisioning disaster recovery sites with virtual systems, also benefiting from using less floor space and lowering energy consumption.

The savings in physical infrastructure costs is just the first step. With VMware virtual infrastructure, complex multi-step system recovery procedures are simplified and dramatically reduced. Dependence on specialized

VMware creates a Virtual Data File (vmdk) for each virtual client. Rapid system rebuild requires preservation of these data objects, which are 2GB or larger data files. When the vmdk is preserved, the state of the virtual client is preserved from the point of failure and can be rapidly recovered on new VMware systems. Data Domain deduplication storage offers significant advantages in reducing the storage footprint required to preserve vmdk files by eliminating what is typically high degrees of redundancy between them. Data Domain inline deduplication and replication can also move deduplicated vmdk files efficiently over WAN connections to disaster recovery locations, providing the fastest time to DR-readiness.

The unique structure of vmdk files typically includes the redundant rewriting of many empty blocks every time a vmdk file is captured. Data Domain deduplication is ideal for eliminating these redundancies by removing duplicate blocks, significantly reducing the size, storage and replication costs of these files. This data reduction lowers the cost of operations by reducing storage and network bandwidth requirements by 40-60x on average.

VMware virtualized server infrastructure combined with Data Domain deduplication storage also provides a more reliable disaster recovery plan. System recovery processes are simplified and automated, while disk-based operations raise the speed and reliability of data recovery. Time-to-recovery objectives are improved, testing of disaster recovery plans is less time-consuming and less costly, and training new personnel to operate disaster recovery procedures is easier.

Consolidate Backup and Disaster Recovery for Your VMware Environment: Data Protection Challenges

As data continues to grow exponentially, the need for rapid backup and reliable recovery continues to put stress on tape infrastructures. Slow performance and reliability issues with tape make it a poor choice for safeguarding data, and have caused a growing number of organizations to adopt disk-based data management strategies. Organizations have also recognized the advantages of network-based electronic vaulting to move data offsite as soon as it is protected. However, without a massive reduction in data, disk storage and replication bandwidth have been too expensive to make these options practical in most environments.

Data Domain deduplication storage makes consolidated backup and replication for disaster recovery practical, with radical reductions in the storage footprint required to store backup and archive data.

Data Domain deduplication storage is ideal for organizations with VMware Infrastructure 3 or ESX Server systems encountering any of the following challenges:

  • The lack of a single storage platform supporting backup and disaster recovery solutions for combined vmdk and application data backups.
  • Long backup and recovery windows required to protect large vmdk files.
  • Exorbitant storage costs to retain multiple backup copies on disk, including vmdk files.
  • Prohibitively high replication costs, forcing a continued dependence on tape rotation for disaster recovery.