Storage virtualization aides disaster recovery

While most enterprises begin their virtualization foray at the server level, faith-based financial services firm Mennonite Mutual Aid (MMA) came at it from the storage side of the shop. The primary objective was remote disaster recovery, which a growing variety of virtualization capabilities can neatly address.

10 must-have virtualization tools

"If you think about virtualizing servers and consolidating storage, you'd go a long way toward building a disaster-recovery plan by positioning servers and secondary storage at a disaster recovery location," says Richard Plank, network operating system administrator for MMA, in Goshen, Ind.

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While most enterprises begin their virtualization foray at the server level, faith-based financial services firm Mennonite Mutual Aid (MMA) came at it from the storage side of the shop. The primary objective was remote disaster recovery, which a growing variety of virtualization capabilities can neatly address.

10 must-have virtualization tools

"If you think about virtualizing servers and consolidating storage, you'd go a long way toward building a disaster-recovery plan by positioning servers and secondary storage at a disaster recovery location," says Richard Plank, network operating system administrator for MMA, in Goshen, Ind.

At MMA, Plank migrated from a direct-attached storage environment to a tiered, virtual infrastructure with remote disaster recovery using FalconStor Network Storage Server and VMware for server virtualization, as well as FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL) for backups. With the virtual setup, MMA avoided a forklift upgrade on the storage side, while meeting a 4-hour recovery time objective for mission-critical applications, he says.

VTL technology, which presents storage disks as tape drivers to backup software, also has helped New Orleans law firm McGlinchey Stafford meet its disaster recovery objectives, says Bob Pate, network operations manager for the firm.

Prior to using VTL, from Sepaton, a full backup of the McGlinchey Stafford environment took as long as 95 hours, stretching throughout the weekend and into Wednesday midday, Pate says. "By switching to a Sepaton environment, we went from an average transfer rate of about 250 megabytes per hour to 200 to 300 gigabytes per hour. Backups are down to 44 hours now," he says.

As an extra protection measure, since the firm has several office in hurricane zones, Pate uses VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to consolidate virtual machine (VM) snapshots on a backup proxy server.

In the case of a hurricane, IT moves the device to a safe area as a precaution. In the case of an extended evacuation, such as occurred Hurricane Katrina, IT can restore these snapshots, bringing them online as needed. IT also ships this device between offices for backups of VMware installations prior to any firmware updates to servers and SANs or major changes to the environments, he describes.

Overall, virtualization vendors are striving to make storage and its associated backup processes easier to handle, industry watchers say. VMware, for example, included a bunch of storage-related updates in its latest release, vSphere 4.0. Thin provisioning is now available in vSphere, and Storage vMotion is integrated into the VMware management tool.

Particularly for backups, vSphere includes vStorage API for Data Protection. Along the lines of VCB, this API lets backup tools directly connect to VMs for incremental or full backup and restore processes.

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