Leveraging Virtualization for BAR Partnership for Emergency Planning, 2010

Description Server virtualization has decoupled server operating systems and applications from their traditional hardware and platforms. Where appropriate, virtualization has shown significant opportunities to enhance operations and management of servers and applications. The virtualization layer of the server stack is a perfect place to tackle the challenges of backups and recovery. We will discuss some technologies that are bringing interesting new solutions for how to protect your server configuration and data and to ease recovery in the event of disaster or data loss.

About Me... Dominic Romeo – 14 years in IT – Senior Systems Engineer out of Omaha, NE – 9 years with CoSentry – EMC storage, Cisco networking, Vmware vSphere – Managing multiple ESX clusters In our data centers: KC, Sioux Falls, Omaha In other data centers: Australia, UK – Experience with multiple backup technologies for VMs

Who is CoSentry? Four Regional Facilities – 35,000 Sq.Ft. Existing Raised Floor – N+1 Power and Cooling Infrastructure – PCI DSS v1.2 Physical Security Compliant – SAS 70 Type II Certified Service Provider Class Network Infrastructure Over 20 Gbps of Bandwidth for Internet Transit 14 Carriers for TDM, Ethernet, and Optical Circuits Colocation, Disaster Recovery Facilities and Services, Managed Services including Virtual Server Resources and Managed Tape or Disk Backups and Recovery

Agenda Disasters Happen Technologies to Have Your Eye On Backups Resources for Recovery Q & A

Disasters Happen Bad things happen, even to good data centers...

Man-Made Disasters Most IT disasters are man-made –System misconfiguration –Unscheduled maintenance –Cabling or physical server disturbance –Voice or data network provider issues –Limited capacities during peak demand –Power issues

Technologies to Have Your Eye On Hypervisor –VMware vSphere De-Duplication –As a general technology and some specific implementations Image Level Backups that Also Support Individual File Restore Cloud Resources for Recovery

VMware vSphere ESXi is here – No more Service Console on my ESX host – Will this affect my VM backup strategy? – Some backup current technologies depend on the hooks they have at the Service Console level of ESX VMware adding features like Data Recovery and vStorage APIs Source: VMware

De-Duplication Identification of unique chunks in a set of data, enabling the elimination of duplicates when stored or moved. Source: EMC Some major benefits: 1.Reduces bandwidth 2.Shrinks backup windows 3.Reduces server load 4.Every backup is a “full”

Image Level Backups VMDKs are the heart of your VMs Moving your server is as simple as moving a file around Backup the VMDK and VMX and you have all you need to recovery you server and data Snapshots Databases and other applications may require extra hoops be jumped through

Simplify Individual File Recovery Most recovery operations are not for a full-blown server restore. Make sure your solution can also allow for very easy recovery of individual files with some assurances of access control. You should need a disaster declaration to just recover a few Word docs or s.

Cloud Resources The “cloud” is stuff you don’t want to care about –CPU, RAM, Disk, and other commodities you need to run your servers You cloud provider cares How do you bring your data and workloads up on that providers cloud Is it easy or is there real heavy lifting to still be done?

Backup Challenges Backup infrastructure management Agent installation headaches and licensing Multiple concurrent backup solutions Backup software maintenance Network and resource utilization Verifying backups Testing restores Remote offices Tape cost Tape count growth Tape drive maintenance Offsite tape rotations Archiving Source: EMC

Backup and Recovery Goals Reduce backup and restore costs Decrease the time it takes to run backups Reduce or remove challenges of tape backups Reduce or remove ongoing maintenance costs Efficiently backup remote locations Centralize and ease management Enforce backups without causing undue system strain Simplify restores Meet RPO and RTO requirements Provide increased ability to verify backups and do non-impacting restores to test recovery strategy

Avamar Overview Complete EMC backup and recovery product – Avamar backup and recovery software with integrated source-based global data de-duplication – EMC-certified hardware Built-in high availability – Avamar RAIN technology – Spare node – RAID on each node – Redundant power distribution Simplifies: – Purchase (hardware and software together) – Deployment and Service (single vendor support) – Capacity Expansion (add nodes)

VMware Data Recovery Overview VMware’s appliance-based solution Image and file level restores De-duplication as VM backup is stored Simplifies: – Purchase – Management – On-going backup operations Requires: – vCenter – Certain level of vSphere licensing – Additional storage

CoSentry Managed Disk Backup Client data is protected on disk (not tape) Uses EMC Avamar technology with a dash of CoSentry networks, facilities, and monitoring/management Scale from 100GB to 40TB Full RAIN implementation No additional fees for agents (OS, DB, Mail) No Cap-Ex, just an Op-Ex for actual data that is protected Clients can store their data on multiple grids in different data centers and do extended retention Clients can replicate their existing Avamar node/grid to CoSentry Can eliminate need for tape

CoSentry Virtual Server Resources The stuff in the “Cloud” VMware vSphere Intel Xeon 5500 CPUs Lots and lots of RAM EMC Clariion CX4 SAN Cisco switches and routers Cisco firewalls and IPS Enterprise speed and redundancy N+1 ESX host capacity Source: VMware

Benefits of Cloud VM Resources Right-size your VM for DR or production – Quickly and painlessly resize if demands change – Match disk space with what you are protecting Right-size your DR bills – Reserved resources are a fraction of the cost of building your own VM cluster, network, and SAN for DR – Pay as little as 1/5 th of the cost of doing it yourself Know that server resources will be there when you need them the most – Let the provider worry about it

Benefits of Cloud VM Resources It saves you green – For approximately 20% of the cost to own resources, you can reserve them and spin up at time of need It is green – Lights out when not in use but spins up quickly You can actually test it without disturbing your production environments Reduces strain on your IT resources

Disaster Recovery How to ensure reliable DR – Difficulties – Test – Virtualization helps – Backup platform helps Recover virtual and physical servers – Can I recovery my physical servers in to VMs or do I need other solutions Source: VMware Protect all my data Do you still have some physical servers?

Questions and Answers Dominic Romeo