replication

Offsite Backups in Large Data environments without tape

Hi folks, I wanted to talk backup for a second. Now in large data center environments backup strategies aren’t always cut and dry. You are usually dealing with large amounts of data and very small backup windows.

We’re talking about servers that need to be up 24/7 and 365 days a year and lots of data going through them on a daily basis. Once you get into counting your backup size by terabytes vs gigabytes it’s time to start looking at some different strategies.

VTL has always been a good idea, offloading to disk and then offloading to tape later when you have more time to do it. This way you can offload your backups at high speed in your short window. However an often overlooked method which has started to gain serious traction is deduplication. Many vendors offer it and some even combine it into their VTL offerings. Deduplication can achieve an average compression ratio of 20:1 and at it’s best go as high as 50:1 and even higher sometimes.

So take a moment to look at the deduplication offerings out there. Some of them even offer the ability to replicate the deduped data to an offsite location over the WAN without using tape at all. This way you can save on the cost of tape.

-RP

Replication of Virtual Machines to a Hot Site

So you finally have your VMware environment all set up and everything is running great. Everyone is on board with virtualization and you were able to consolidate your data center down to one server room with one rack. Now all of a sudden you’re tasked with the duties of replication to another site.

What can you do in this situation? There are many cool products out there at your disposable.  One of these products is called vReplicator. It is made by Vizioncore, the creators of vRanger which is used for backing up virtual machines.

vReplicator will take your virtual machine and replicate it across the WAN to another site. Then when there is a failover you can start up the virtual machine in this other site if the other site has completely failed. Or if the main site is still up  you can facilitate a failover through the vReplicator software itself. Either way, it works great! You can read more about it here.