Buyer's guide: Backup and disaster recovery in the age of

virtualisation October 2014

Bob Tarzey, Analyst and Director
[email protected], +44 7900 275517

Quocirca Comment: The increasing use of virtualisation requires a re-think of

backup and disaster recovery plans. For most organisations there will be more
resilience at a lower cost.

We do backups because we know we have to; in

case we lose the primary versions of data and/or
the systems that create and manage that data. It
could just be that the original gets accidentally
deleted or changed; however, the possibility of
system failure will be top of mind for many.
That could be anything from a disk crash on a
users device to a data centre being crushed by
meteorite. When such a failure happens, it is not
just data that needs restoring but the full working
environment; in other words disaster recovery.
Backup and disaster recovery are not directly
interchangeable terms; but disaster recovery is
not possible without a backup in the first place.
Disaster recovery is having the tested
wherewithal to get systems restored and running
as quickly as possible including associated data.
The increasing use of virtualisation has changed
the way disaster recovery is carried out because
in a virtual world a system can be recovered by
duplicating images of virtual machine (VM) and
recreating them elsewhere. VM replication,
disaster recovery and the way the market has
adapted to virtualisation is the focus of this
buyers guide.
In the old days if a server crashed then you
would probably go through the following steps:
1. Get a new hardware server. Hopefully you
would have a spare to hand, probably an out-

Buyer's guide: Backup and disaster

recovery in the age of virtualisation
October 2014

of-date model, if it had not been needed for

some time.
2. Then either:
a) Install all the systems and applications
software, attempting to get all the settings
as they were before. Unless of course you
had done that in advance; not possible if
you had only invested one or two
redundant servers to be on standby for
many more live ones, not knowing which
would fail.
b) For a really critical application you may
have a hot standby, all fired up and ready
to go. However, that doubles the costs of
application ownership, all the hardware
and software being paid for twice.
c) Restore the most recent data backup, for
a database that might be almost up to
date, but for a file server, an overnight
backup may be all the is available, so
only as far back as the end of the last
working day. Anything that was in
memory at the time of the failure would
likely have been lost. How far back you
aim to go is defined in a backup plan as
the recovery point objective (RPO).
Virtualisation changes everything and increases
the number of options. First data can be easily
backed-up as part of an image of a given virtual
machine (VM) including application software,
local data, settings and memory. Second, there is

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2014 Quocirca Ltd

no need for a physical server rebuild; the VM

can be recreated in any other compatible virtual
environment. This may be spare in-house
capacity or acquired from a third party cloud
service provider. Most of the costs of having
redundant systems disappear.
Disaster recovery is cheaper, quicker, easier and
more complete in a virtual world. In backup
jingo, faster recovery time objectives (RTO) are
easier to achieve. At least, that is the theory, but
it can get more complicated with the need to coordinate different VMs that rely on each, for
example an application VM and a database VM,
so testing of recovery is still paramount and can
actually forestall problems in live systems.
There are a number of different approaches,
from tightly integrated hypervisor-level VM
replication through to disaster recovery as a
service (DRaaS).
Integrated hypervisor replication
The leading virtualisation platform vendors
themselves, including VMware, Microsoft
Hyper-v and Citrix Xen, offer VM varying levels
replication services embedded in their products.
They are tightly integrated into the hypervisor
itself and therefore limited to a given virtual
environment. However, this does give them the
potential to achieve the performance for need for
continuous data protection (CDP) through the
use of shadow VMs (virtual hot standby),
minimising both RPO and RTO.
There are other products that tightly integrate
VM replication at the hypervisor level, for
example EMCs RecoverPoint, which supports
the co-ordinated replication and recovery of
multiple VMs, so it can ensure a VM running an
application is consistent with an associated
database VM. Currently this is only for VM but
Hyper-V and cloud management stacks such as
OpenStack are on the horizon.
Buyer's guide: Backup and disaster
recovery in the age of virtualisation
October 2014

Another is Zerto, which says it has built in better

automation and orchestration than the
virtualisation
platform
vendors,
further
minimising the impact on the run time
environment. Zerto supports just VMware but
has plans for Hyper-V and Amazon Web
Services (AWS), which means in the future it
will support failover from an in-house VMware
system to say, AWS or other non-VMware-based
system. Its product could also be used for preplanned migration of workloads.
VM snapshotting
Many other virtual-aware tools work by taking
snapshots of VMs at given intervals. This
involves pausing the VM for long enough to
copy its data, settings and memory before
returning it to its previous state. The snapshot
can be used to recreate the VM over and over
again. The RPO is dependent on how often
snapshots are taken (which could often enough
to be close to CDP, but that would impact
overall performance). The RTO is dependent on
little more than how quickly access can be
gained to alternative virtual resource, which with
pre-planning should be almost immediately.
A number of new vendors have emerged that
specialise in the backup of virtual environments.
Swiss-based Veeam launched its product in 2008
and supports VMware and Microsoft Hyper-v.
Nakivo (founded 2012) only supports VMware.
As these products have been built for a virtual
world, they have many of the required adaptions
built-in from the start, for example creating VM
snapshotting and network acceleration to make
off-site replication more efficient.
The traditional backup vendors have adapted
their products. For example Symantec has just
released Backup Exec 2014; which it believes
matches the capability and performance of the
new arrivals. Dell claims that its AppAssure

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2014 Quocirca Ltd

mimics CDP by using a smart agent that avoids

freezing the VM and can take a snapshot at least
once every five minutes. CommVaults
Simplana and arcserve (recently divested from
CA Inc.) have also had the challenge of catching
up.
One difference with many of the traditional
vendors is their capability to support both older
physical environments alongside virtual ones,
which is still the reality on the ground in many
organisations. It also means their products are
often used for migration, i.e. backup a physical
server and restore it as a VM.
Many cloud infrastructure service providers, for
example Rackspace and Amazon provide VM
replication, enabling customers to put their own
failover in place, but generally this is limited to
their own platforms.
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)
providers
The widespread use of virtualisation and
availability of cloud platforms for recovering
workloads has led to a proliferation of DRaaS
offerings. Here the replication of VMs is
embedded in the service, so that customer has
little to do other than due diligence and to sign
on the dotted line.
Some are offered by cloud/hosting service
providers; for example NTT Communications
has a European offering in partnership the USbased DRaaS provider Geminare. Broader
disaster recovery specialists such as SunGard
and IBM include DRaaS in their portfolios.

recoverability of the images it takes of its

customers server environments. This not only
ensures recoverability but often pre-empts
problems the customer is yet to notice. Plan B
operates at the application level so is hypervisor
neutral supporting VMware, Hyper-v and Xen.
Plan Bs service can image physical servers as
well as virtual ones.
Quorum offers a service called onQ that was
originally developed for the US Navy to enable
the rapid movement of processing from one part
of a ship to another in times of battle damage, so
it is very fast and very resilient supporting
physical or virtual Linux and Windows servers.
onQ is also hypervisor agnostic. In the UK it
uses a local data centre partner to recover the
customer server images as VMs, it claims RTOs
that are as quick as a server reboot.
Interestingly, Plan B says that whenever its
service has been invoked to recover a physical
server in a virtual environment then the customer
does not go back. In other words, disaster
recovery services can be used to migrate to
virtual environments, but can also provide the
motivation to do so in the first place. That may
have got you thinking, if cloud is good enough
as a secondary backup for even our most critical
applications, could it not actually also become
our primary platform in the longer term?.
This article first appeared in Computer Weekly
http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Backu
p-and-disaster-recovery-in-the-age-ofvirtualisation

DRaaS providers have to provide unique value to

make it worth their customers while. Some take
this to a new level, for example UK-based Plan
B Disaster Recovery says its Microsoft Windows
Server DRaaS offering can guarantee recovery
because it includes nightly testing of the
Buyer's guide: Backup and disaster
recovery in the age of virtualisation
October 2014

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2014 Quocirca Ltd

About Quocirca
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Buyer's guide: Backup and disaster

recovery in the age of virtualisation
October 2014

http://www.quocirca.com

2014 Quocirca Ltd