Issue link: https://insights.oneneck.com/i/1186400
8 DISASTER RECOVERY GUIDE – POWERED BY ZERTO DR Technologies and Virtualized Environments Virtualization of the datacenter has proven to be a true IT game- changer, providing increased flexibility and control in managing production workloads, as well as significantly streamlining the implementation and operational support. To fully realize the benefits of this soware-defined environment – this private or hybrid cloud – organizations need to optimize all IT processes and activities for the virtual environment: security, compliance, and business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR). When it comes to BC/DR, many organizations still see this as a costly insurance policy, especially since the available solutions are oen very expensive and inadequate in a virtualized environment. Hardware and soware Many disaster recovery solutions focus on minimizing downtime based on hardware failures, power outages or natural disasters. Most datacenter issues aren't whole datacenter outages. IT is typically tasked with recovering an accidentally deleted file or even a single VM that was patched and is now having issues or other smaller events. This means that disasters are not always caused by hardware failures nor is it strictly solved by hardware solutions. What makes BC/DR in a virtualized environment different? • Soware-defined – In a virtual environment, replicating at the hardware layer is not adequate. Replication must take place in the hypervisor, so that the business needs will be available in the event of a disaster. The end-users aren't looking for a logical storage unit, they are looking for the application — Oracle, Microso Exchange, or another application • Virtualization-aware – With a virtualization strategy in place, the disaster recovery solution needs to be virtualization-aware as well. This ensures that any changes in the production environment will be reflected in the disaster recovery strategy, ensuring protection is not compromised while still delivering the flexibility and agility that virtualization offers • Application consistency – Many critical applications use more than one VM and these are interdependent. That means they need to be replicated together to remain consistent • Scalability – It is critical to look for a solution purpose-built to protect many VMs. Data and applications are growing at exponential rates. The disaster recovery solution needs to scale with the growth without adding significant complexity and overhead • Change – Due to their dynamic nature, virtual environments tend to sprawl which makes BC/DR more complex. Businesses need one platform that can support heterogeneous environments • Granularity – To be able to respond to some of the most important causes of data breaches, like data corruption and accidental user errors, granularity is needed to be able to restore single VMs or files • Frequency – IT environments – not only the virtualized ones – are crucial for businesses to survive. Replication of VMs, data and files needs to be done in a high frequency. A daily backup won't doAvailable disaster recovery solutions Available disaster recovery solutions A number of disk-to-disk-based DR solutions have been introduced over the years, none of them fully virtualization- aware. In a short overview we will summarize their structures and their shortcomings in a virtualized environment. Array-based replication Array-based replication products are provided by the storage vendors and deployed as modules inside the storage array. They are single-vendor solutions, compatible only with the specific storage solution already in use. The relationship between the VM and storage is fixed and the entire LUN is replicated, whether it is 40% or 90% utilized. • Hardware-defined – Array-based replication is designed to replicate physical entities. It doesn't "see" the virtual machines and is oblivious to configuration changes