Why Storage Virtualization?
Moving to server virtualization allows enterprises to re-engineer storage practices to integrate backup and disaster recovery operations. Storage virtualization not only solves some of the business-critical problems VMware heard from businesses back in ’08, it also reduces operating expenses and restrains capital costs.
Storage virtualization has other measurable benefits, as well. Here are our top five:
- Storage virtualization eliminates the performance impact of backup.
- Storage virtualization enables backup anytime and shrinks the backup window.
- Storage virtualization reliably delivers VM recovery from tape when needed.
- Storage virtualization supports more simultaneous backup jobs.
- Storage virtualization facilitates data protection through data replication.
There were (and still are) several reasons why server virtualization backup has posed such challenges to newly virtual data centers. The traditional, agent-based physical server backup model relied on excess system resources, and server virtualization was designed specifically to exploit these resources. Furthermore, the greater application density per server left little room for backup processing in the virtual data center.
But re-thinking the approach to storage can change all that. Storage virtualization sets the stage for better virtual machine data protection and solves the frustrations of early virtual shops that tried to perform traditional back-up and recovery in environments that were anything but traditional.
