Backup, Recovery for Virtual Servers: Leading Protection Challenge

Recoverability of data, validating backup success and response time for troubleshooting backup failures were named by at least one-third of respondents in a recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) survey as the top challenges for protecting an organization’s virtual server environment.

The survey, sponsored by Bocada Inc., provider of data protection management software and the creator of the Data Protection Service Management (DPSM) model, queried IT professionals from North America responsible for the operation, management and protection of physical and virtual server resources as to the issues that they face in protecting their business-critical data. Bocada announced availability of their new Bocada Vision solution aimed at addressing the challenges uncovered in the survey.

Sixty percent of respondents rated backup and recovery processes for virtual servers as a Top 5 data protection challenge, while citing validating recoverability, gaining visibility into capacity use and understanding performance impacts on applications/workloads in the virtual environments as other top concerns.

Among the survey’s other findings:

• Recoverability of data was both the most-characterized challenge for protecting an organization’s virtual server environment (39 percent of respondents) with validating backup success being the second biggest challenge ( noted by 35 percent of respondents)
• Users intend to increase the ratio of virtual machines per physical server, which will potentially further complicate backup challenges. While seventy-two percent of respondents estimate they are currently running 10 or fewer virtual machines per physical server, in the next 24 months 65 percent of respondents expected to be running 11 or more VMs per server, with 23 percent expecting to be running more than 25 per physical machine.
• New challenges also arise when backing up virtual machines, 31 percent of respondents noted that understanding the impact of backup operations on applications/workloads sharing the same physical server was a concern. As organizations continue to increase the ratio of VMs per server, the performance impact of running backups will become more critical to understand.
• Capacity management was also a top concern. Overall, 30 percent of users considered tracking capacity trends and consumption a challenge in the virtual data protection environment, and 51 percent of respondents’ utilizing snapshots cited it was important to understand what capacity could be reclaimed by deleting out of date snapshots.

Bocada Vision addresses issues of VM recoverability by providing insight into whether backups are successful and where recovery points are. It tells users what resources are being used to protect VMs and whether they are optimized while detailing the performance impact of protecting VMs. A standalone solution for managing data protection in virtual environments, Bocada Vision can also be integrated with Bocada Prism to provide physical and virtual protection of a user’s entire backup infrastructure.

"ESG’s survey reveals many inadequacies of data protection in virtualized environments that clearly need to be addressed," said Nancy Hurley, Bocada CEO. "New challenges arise as organizations increase the number of VMs in their environment, and our goal is to provide an effective way for users to monitor and manage backup activities and address key management issues. Bocada Vision offers organizations a better way to ensure recoverability of virtual servers."