By Billy Naples

Given these difficult financial times customers are struggling to do more with less.  This includes virtualized server environments.  If you thought 15 VMs per physical host was good enough.  Think again.  Customers are telling me they have to get 20-25 VMs per physical host this year.  There just isn’t any money for new servers, (check out HPs recent earnings if you don’t believe me), but plenty of projects in the pipeline.

  
One of the first places to salvage valuable shared resources is agent based programs like backup.  Running a traditional online backup agent inside a virtual machine uses valuable shared resources, (i.e. CPU, memory, I/O), that ultimately decreases the total number of VMs per physical host.  To address this challenge some virtualization platform vendors have developed tools to offload the backup process to proxy servers.  The problem is these tools are just not mature enough to interface directly with the applications running in a virtual machine.  The result is a “crash-consistent” copy of the application data.  There is no guarantee of recovering the data.  You may have to run application specific tools to check for data corruption, extending your recovery time, or worse delete the corrupted data.

Data Protector 6.1 solves the problem of consistent point in time backups while providing the highest density of VMs per physical host.  The Data Protector Zero Downtime Backup extension offloads the backup process to the storage array ensuring no shared resources are used.   As Zero Downtime Backup is application aware it means no time is wasted checking the integrity of the application data before recovering data.  Point in time recovery of application data can be achieved by adding the Instant Recovery extension.   Systems can now be recovered in seconds or minutes instead of hours or days.  The combination of Zero Downtime Backup and Instant recovery provides the highest level RPO/RTO for your virtualized production servers without impacting your virtual machines or physical host servers.