Easy five steps: Eliminate virtual server security concerns

Server Virtualization has many advantages. Solution providers are processing an increasing number of requests for server virtualization to transition customers to large-scale virtual server deployment, while also gaining benefits including cost savings, business and application flexibility. Virtualization technology is rapidly becoming the core of contemporary data centers. Phil Curran provides five suggestions for implementing such solutions in this article.

As virtualization steadily moves out of the testing/development environment and enters the mainstream data center to support business and level-1 applications, customers are faced with virtual servers and virtual machines (VMS) new challenges related to data protection and management. The provider of technical solutions that understands these challenges is fully prepared and hopes to become an important consulting consultant trusted by the customer.

The following five principles provide some reference and guidance for solution providers to help them establish leading virtual server data protection practices so that customers can deploy virtual servers more easily and quickly.

1. Select a backup solution that can optimize the performance of the virtual platform

The common advantages of virtualization and cloud-based infrastructure are obvious, such as workload balancing cost savings, application flexibility, and less physical space occupation. However, the demand to retain resources for data management and protection is growing rapidly. Storage and backup teams are often asked to use limited computers, networks, and storage resources to protect the ever-growing data to be stored on a large scale. The volume of data stored in virtual machines increases rapidly, making it difficult to maintain. This will cause the backup window to be damaged, the performance of the front-end application to be degraded, or even unable to meet the service level requirements.

End users need a backup solution that provides performance, manageability, and scalability for mission-critical applications on their virtual servers to support these important applications as needed, and ensure that the data is fully protected and easy to recover. It can be seen that solution providers need to understand the individual requirements and dynamic features of the customer's virtual environment, and provide appropriate modern solutions to minimize the impact on front-end applications. By deploying snapshot and replication tools, solution providers can implement data protection policies to reduce the time required to protect the largest data storage and the most demanding workload to minutes, this reduces the impact on front-end applications. The ideal solution is to perfectly combine snapshot efficiency advantages with backup directories that greatly simplify recovery operations.

2. Ensure application-aware Data Protection

As more and more critical applications are virtualized, it is necessary to provide them with the same level of protection and recovery as they are set on purely physical servers. Modern data centers need to adopt Protocol backup and recovery functions to ensure that the running time of key applications running on virtual machines is maximized. This depends on the selection of appropriate data and information management solutions that provide continuous application-aware data protection and adapt to the mandatory constraints of a highly integrated virtualization environment. However, not all backup solutions for virtual servers are the same. Their difference lies in the details. Data protection with application-aware capabilities is not as easy as simply saying "we have" or "We use VSS"-For most deployments, this is far from enough. Application-aware data protection must include functions such as service log truncation, seamless search, and individual application recovery, to ensure that the images running on the virtual machine are restored at a certain point in time. This will bring confidence to more applications for virtualization, so that the advantages of the virtual platform can be achieved more quickly. Solution providers need to understand their customers' requirements for application protection and recovery, and provide matching optimization solutions.

3. Integrated Data replication technology to meet service level requirements of key applications

Data is growing and changing rapidly, and the backup 24 hours ago is no longer enough to meet the demand for data growth. As enterprises deploy more and more key applications in virtual server environments, they need to implement near-real-time recovery-not from backup copies of the previous night. For example, many Exchange systems have deployed four-hour recovery node targets (RPO), and many database applications have one-hour sub-recovery node targets. Traditional backup cannot meet these service level agreements (SLAs ). Creating frequent recovery nodes without affecting production activities is a huge challenge.

Solution providers need to integrate Virtual Machine snapshots and Data Replication technologies to help customers quickly, efficiently, and economically create copies of production data for recovery. Advanced functions, such as data encryption, compression, and bandwidth restrictions, can protect data and optimize the use of existing network bandwidth. Data copies can be accessed in real time to create multiple recovery nodes and perform traditional backup without affecting server performance or create a second copy in another location for disaster recovery. The result is that the customer can maintain normal business operation with minimal service interruption and data loss.

4. granular data recovery

To accelerate data recovery, you need a data integration method that restores small particles at the volume, file, or application object level. Traditional methods require returning to the entire virtual machine database (such as VMDK) and searching all the content to find a single file, such as an email, which is time-consuming and occupies a large amount of resources. At present, there are many new methods available, but they may require secondary operations to obtain the required small particles of data/files, which will increase the additional processing time in the data protection process, and the risk will also come. Therefore, it is currently the most ideal solution to achieve granular data recovery with only one backup and recovery operation.

5. provides automatic management tools to enhance virtual machine protection

The administrator can now deploy a new virtual machine within several minutes. The simplicity of this implementation has led to the rapid spread of virtual machines, making it very time-consuming to track new virtual machines and apply data protection policies. Important virtual machines may not be backed up after they are created, which brings great business risks.

In-depth Management of assembly and Advanced Automation will help customers protect hundreds of virtual machines within minutes and easily expand to thousands of virtual machines. Advanced features such as automatic protection of virtual machines will automatically discover new virtual machines and add them to data protection policies in an obvious way.

Virtualization is spreading like a fire, followed by a transition to a virtual data center and around-the-clock operation. In order to better manage and protect virtual data, end users are re-considering traditional backup technologies. Therefore, solution providers should also act as trusted consultants. These five guiding principles Enable solution providers to help customers achieve modern data protection and overcome the challenges posed by virtual server deployment. In this way, the customer can upgrade the overall data and information management methods to a new level, so as to quickly adapt to business needs change and expansion needs.