Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index Results Illustrate
Concerns About Hybrid Environments
Woburn, Mass., February 24, 2011 Acronis, a leading provider of easy to use backup and
security solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, is
warning small and medium businesses (SMBs) about the potential
concerns associated with the rapid adoption of virtualization, as
the complexities of managing migration, backup and recovery between
physical, virtual and cloud environments set in.
The warning stems from results from the recently released
Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index showing that 73% of
small-to-medium-sized companies worldwide agree that virtualization
has either completely or partially changed the way the business
manages its backup and disaster recovery[1]. While the
introduction of virtualization was fuelled by server consolidation
and cost efficiencies, this so-called next phase or second
generation of virtualization 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 virtualization was
not about backup, it was largely driven by cost and consolidation.
As we progress into widespread virtualization 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," explains Seth Goodling, virtualization
practice manager at Acronis.
"Many traditional back-ups are agent-based, which means that an
application is required and consumes precious virtual machine
processing resources. Simultaneous initiation of agent-based
backups can cause serious virtual machine disruptions, including
total failure of the underlying physical host. The next phase of
virtualization has to include backup best practices leveraged for a
hybrid environment, a central solution for all environments."
"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 virtualized environments," said Justin
Giardina, CTO of iland-a cloud provider. "What businesses are
looking for is help in protecting their data and minimizing the
impact of unplanned downtime. The combination of Acronis and iland
satisfies this need by providing extended, offsite resources that
eliminate budget, capacity, and change management issues while
still allowing for rapid recovery options."
Agent-based software has been adapted to provide some of the
functionality required for backup and recovery in a virtualized
environment. However, experts warn that these work-arounds have
proven to be hard to implement, ineffective and added costs to the
virtualization programs. These issues combined with the complexity
of managing data across physical, virtual and cloud environments
are being noted as potential obstacles in the path to effective
virtualization and creating a disaster recover strategy.
Acronis' Five Recommendations
To help realize the full benefits of virtualization, Acronis
offers tips to IT managers:
- To close the loop on virtualization efforts, 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.
- To provide the lowest virtual machine Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the fastest Recovery Time Objective (RTO), each virtual machine should be independently backed up and frequently refreshed. This is to ensure time difference between last backup and the current production server state is as small as possible.
- Image-based backups provide quick recovery in a cloud environment. Image-based recovery 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. Avoid this by taking an entire VM system image and using it as a warm VM standby.
- Use 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 same rules apply to virtual as physical. If you back up your physical data to the cloud, why not back up your VMs to take advantage of offsite backup for less.
[1] Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index in
conjunction with the Ponemon Institute, January 2011, 3,000
organisations of up to 1,000 seats were questioned
About Acronis:
Acronis is a leader in AI-native cyber protection, unifying data protection, cybersecurity, IT operations and hybrid infrastructure to deliver business continuity, security and compliance with less cost and complexity. More than 21,000 service providers trust Acronis to protect over 750,000 businesses in 150 countries. Acronis is headquartered in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. For more information, visit www.acronis.com.