Singapore, 22nd March 2011 - Acronis, a leading provider of easy-to-use backup, recovery
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
virtualisation, as the complexity 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 2011 showing that 73% of
SMBs worldwide agree that virtualisation has either completely or
partially changed the way the business manages its backup and
disaster recovery[1]. While the introduction of
virtualisation was fuelled by server consolidation and cost
efficiency, 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, while maintaining separate
backup strategies for physical and virtual confuses the backup
scenario even more," explains Bill Taylor-Mountford, President of
Acronis APAC.
"Many traditional backups 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
virtualisation has to include backup best practices leveraged for a
hybrid environment, a central solution for all environments."
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 workarounds have
proven to be hard to implement, ineffective and added costs to the
virtualisation 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
virtualisation and creating disaster recovery strategies.
Acronis' Five Recommendations
To help realise the full benefits of virtualisation, Acronis
suggests following tips to IT managers:
- To close the loop on virtualisation 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 is 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 machines as physical ones. If you back up your physical data to the cloud, why not back up your VMs to take advantage of offsite backups.
Acronis has created a downloadable white paper 'Closing the
Virtualisation Loop'. To download it, please visit https://promo.acronis.com/sg-drindex_t2.html.
[1] Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index in
conjunction with the Ponemon Institute, January 2011, 3,000
organisations of up to 1,000 seats (up to 500 seats in Asia Pacific
region) 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.