Business Worried About Virtual Disaster Recovery

Backup, recovery and security solutions specialist Acronis released data from its Global Disaster Recovery Index. It found that 73 percent of small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) worldwide agreed that virtualisation has either completely or partially changed the way the business manages its backup and disaster recovery.

The company issued a warning about the potential concerns associated with the rapid adoption of virtualisation, as the complexities of managing migration, backup and recovery between physical, virtual and cloud environments set in.

Backup Challenge For Hybrid Mixes

The report concluded while the introduction of virtualisation was fuelled by server consolidation and cost efficiencies, this so-called next phase or second generation of virtualisation adoption poses challenges to traditional backup and recovery processes as users struggle to implement known backup and disaster recovery practices in a new hybrid environment.

“The introduction of server and workstation virtualisation was not about backup, it was largely driven by cost and consolidation. As we progress into widespread virtualisation adoption, IT managers are learning that traditional physical server backup solutions are inadequate for virtual machine backup, and maintaining separate backup strategies for physical and virtual confuses the backup scenario even more,” said Seth Goodling, virtualisation practice manager at Acronis.

The index showed agent-based software has been adapted to provide some of the functionality required for backup and recovery in a virtualised environment. However, experts warn that these work-arounds have proven to be hard to implement, ineffective and added costs to the virtualisation programmes. These issues, combined with the complexity of managing data across physical, virtual and cloud environments, are noted as potential obstacles in the path to effective virtualisation and creating a disaster recover strategy.

“As a cloud service provider, we’re often approached by IT directors who still have concerns about the process of safely backing up data in their virtualised environments,” said Justin Giardina, CTO of Iland, a cloud infrastructure specialist. “What businesses are looking for is help in protecting their data and minimising the impact of unplanned downtime.”

The Acronis report also offered tips to IT managers, including implementation of a backup and disaster recovery strategy as robust as that deployed for physical servers is required for all virtual machines (especially if the virtual machine supports a production application), independent back up and frequent refreshes of virtual machines, and image-based recovery, which restores the entire virtual machine (VM), including the guest operating system and configuration settings.

“File or block-based backups only restore data and require the entire VM to be configured and imported back to the cloud before the data can be restored,” the report noted. “Avoid this by taking an entire VM system image and using it as a warm VM standby.”

The company also recommends using virtual server backup technology that was designed as agentless from the start. Instead of requiring that each virtual machine have a backup agent or that an expensive proxy server with snapshot space be provided for backup, some software only requires one agent per physical host that can support all of the virtual servers on the host, the report noted.