Organizations are increasingly implementing virtualization server technologies to consolidate their physical infrastructures and reduce hardware, power and cooling expenses. Customers also use virtualization to relocate workloads between physical resources, enabling additional benefits such as enhanced business continuity.

To build a complete business continuance strategy, multiple components are required including:

• High availability
• Virtual machine and data recovery
• Disaster recovery and archiving capabilities

Implementing these functions enables rapid recovery from events such as interruptions to application access and data loss which can disrupt, even cripple business operations. Opposing the benefits of implementing virtualization servers is the fact that many users find that they need more storage than ever before. A recent ESG^* study found that over half of virtualization users experienced a net increase in total storage volume as a direct result of implementing server virtualization. And with this increase of storage, transmitting data over a WAN to a remote site for disaster recovery can be very expensive.

^{* ESG Research Report, The Impact of Server Virtualization on Storage, December 2007}

By leveraging de-duplication technology, the storage requirements for the backup of virtualized servers can be significantly reduced. Remote replication, usually prohibitively expensive due to excessive bandwidth requirements, is now affordable due to the reduction data reduction.

A virtual machine and its data can be encapsulated in a file. For example in a VMware environment, to create the new virtual machine you just need two files: a virtual machine configuration file (.vmx) and a virtual machine hard disk (.vmdk). This .vmdk file can be massive but it is a great candidate for data reduction using de-duplication. Repeated full backups of the .vmdk files use a very small amount of physical disk storage on a de-duplicating backup system. Incremental backups can also be reduced due to duplication of the previous day’s data.

By reducing data using de-duplication before replication, WAN costs can drop dramatically. Using multiple sites for data retention or for failover processing is now affordable.

Quantum deduplication storage systems have been qualified for with leading backup and archiving applications including BakBone, CommVault, EMC, and Symantec. Using backup agents in the virtual machines or VMware Consolidated Backup are both supported.

White Paper

• Data Protection Options for Virtualized Servers

Solution Brief

• Quantum DXi3500 Saves Virtual Iron Time & Money with 95% Reduction in Backup Volume

• Optimize your VMware Protection Strategy

• Quantum and Vizioncore vRanger Pro -- Cost Effective Protection for Virtual and Physical Systems

• Quantum and esXpress -- High Performance & Cost Effective Backup & Recovery for VMware Virtual Infrastructure

• Improving Business Continuance in a Virtualized Environment

Partner Solution Profile

• Intelligent Data Protection for VMware Environments

Data De-duplication technology dramatically increases the power of disk to support backup, data retention and disaster recovery planning, even in a virtualized environment. From the DXi-Series disk-based backup and replication appliances to the highly portable GoVault Data Protection solution, Quantum has data de-duplication solutions for enterprises of any size.