These facts leave IT professionals with a cautious attitude when it comes to moving their most critical applications to virtual platforms. These applications need to be backed up on a regular basis, and in many cases the backup window of these workloads is already hard to meet on physical infrastructure. Emerging technologies are addressing some of these challenges, and in many cases the solutions are virtual-infrastructure specific and don’t work across platforms. That being said, 77 percent of the ESG report respondents prefer a common backup and recovery solutions for both virtual and physical infrastructure.
A shift in the way we implement data protection is necessary. FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) is optimized to protect virtual and physical environments effectively, leveraging a storage-centric approach to data protection to capture application writes and create multiple recovery points locally and remotely. Replacing the batch backup job with a continuous process reduces both CPU and network requirements to maintain a copy of your primary workloads. The staged recovery points are application consistent and always ready for recovery, which transforms the lengthy restore process into an instant availability model, significantly improving the service levels that can be delivered.
The other barrier to server virtualization deployment is storage infrastructure costs. The proliferation of virtual servers massively increases storage capacity requirements. In addition, server virtualization requires shared storage to enable server and application mobility, and these shared storage resources are far more expensive than direct attached storage (DAS). Storage virtualization allows the consolidation of disparate storage technologies into one pool of storage resources that enables optimized utilization to reduce waste and bring the benefits of virtualization to the storage infrastructure: higher availability, data mobility, storage savings, and a full range of data protection features such as snapshots and replication. FalconStor solutions also integrate with disaster recovery (DR) tools such as VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager to reduce DR costs by enabling heterogeneous replication between different storage platforms to allow automated failover and failback operations.
As with any new technology introduction, there is opportunity and there are challenges. Server virtualization has been proven to be a very valuable technology and offers a great opportunity to manage and deliver better services while reducing costs. The benefits of the technology by far outweigh the challenges, and we have the technology today to overcome those challenges to create more value than ever to organizations of all sizes.
To learn more about how FalconStor storage virtualization and data protection solutions for virtual server environments can help you deploy virtual servers, reduce storage costs, and increase business continuity, visit our Virtualization of Nation page.
