Disaster Recovery

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Disaster recovery (DR) is critical for safeguarding business operations. Overcoming the high cost of DR solutions is a top priority for all organizations so they can expand the scope of their protection. Conventional approaches require significant investments in duplicate hardware, third-party tools, and intricate processes, forcing businesses to either overspend or accept inadequate recovery capabilities.

overcoming the high cost of DR

VergeIO’s ioReplicate, seamlessly integrated into VergeOS, offers an innovative and cost-effective alternative. By providing a cost-effective, infrastructure-wide solution, ioReplicate simplifies disaster recovery while ensuring reliability. It not only allows organizations to move beyond VMware’s costly licensing model but also addresses one of IT’s most pressing challenges—achieving fast, dependable recovery in the face of disaster.

Why Is Disaster Recovery So Expensive?

The cost of disaster recovery is driven by several factors:

1. Duplicate Infrastructure Requirements

Traditional DR often requires maintaining identical hardware at the disaster recovery site to ensure compatibility and performance. This duplication doubles the cost of infrastructure, including servers, storage, and networking equipment, making DR prohibitively expensive for many organizations. Overcoming the high cost of DR, requires the ability to use dissimilar and less expensive hardware at the DR site.

2. Fragmented Tools and Processes

Most DR strategies rely on multiple third-party tools for backup, replication, failover, and networking. Integrating these disparate tools requires significant time, expertise, and ongoing maintenance, all of which add to the overall cost.

3. Bandwidth and Data Transfer Costs

Inefficient replication techniques often force organizations to overpay for data transfer capacity. Overcoming the high cost of DR requires global deduplication for efficient bandwidth utilization, especially when sending multiple production sites to a single DR site.

4. Testing and Validation Challenges

Testing a DR plan is essential, but traditional approaches make it difficult and costly to create realistic test environments. Many organizations skip or reduce testing, which increases the risk of failure when a real disaster strikes.

VMware: A Perfect Example of the high cost of DR

VMware environments exemplify the challenges of traditional disaster recovery. VMware’s fragmented approach to DR forces customers to piece together solutions using tools from multiple vendors. For example, businesses must often rely on third-party tools for data replication, backup, failover automation, and network reconfiguration, leading to higher costs and complexity.

Register for our Live ioReplicate Webinar and Demo

Moreover, VMware’s fragmented approach creates inefficiencies in disaster recovery response times. Without tight integration between components, IT teams face delays in ensuring data synchronization, reconfiguring infrastructure, and restoring systems during a disaster.

As VMware’s licensing strategies have shifted, many customers are seeking alternatives to address cost concerns. However, this is also an opportunity for organizations to evaluate how a VMware alternative could significantly improve their disaster recovery capabilities. A solution like VergeOS not only reduces costs but also enhances DR response times with integrated features that eliminate the need for third-party tools and complex configurations.

Does Backup Software Overcome The High Cost of DR?

Because of VMware’s disjointed approach to DR and the high costs of traditional solutions, many organizations have no choice but to rely on backup software as their disaster recovery solution. While this approach reduces costs, it introduces significant challenges that can undermine the effectiveness of recovery efforts.

1. Infrequent Data Capture

Backup solutions typically capture data once per day. This infrequency creates gaps in data protection, leaving hours—or even an entire day—of critical information at risk. For organizations with high transaction volumes, the potential for data loss is unacceptable.

2. Slow Recovery Speeds

Recovering from backups is a time-consuming process. IT teams must locate the correct backup, restore data to new or existing systems, and reconfigure infrastructure to bring operations back online. This process often takes hours or days, resulting in prolonged downtime and lost revenue.

3. Limited Testing Capabilities

Backup systems are not designed for comprehensive disaster recovery testing. Simulating real-world disaster scenarios is difficult, making it harder to validate recovery plans and increasing the likelihood of failure during an actual event.

While backup solutions may offer an economical starting point, their limitations can leave organizations unprepared for real-world disaster scenarios.

VergeOS and ioReplicate: The Perfect Balance

overcoming the high cost of DR

VergeOS with ioReplicate provides the ideal solution for organizations looking to balance cost and performance in their disaster recovery strategy. By integrating advanced DR capabilities into a single platform, VergeIO delivers the speed and efficiency of purpose-built DR tools at a cost lower than traditional backup solutions.

Overcoming the High Cost of DR with ioReplicate

1. Cost-Effective Infrastructure

ioReplicate eliminates the need for identical duplicate hardware by allowing organizations to mix and match commodity servers, existing infrastructure, or even use bare-metal cloud service providers. This flexibility significantly reduces infrastructure costs without compromising performance.

2. Unified DR Tools

All disaster recovery functions—replication, failover, and networking—are built into VergeOS, removing the need for expensive third-party tools and simplifying the DR process.

3. Efficient Data Replication

Using global inline deduplication and ioClone snapshots, ioReplicate minimizes data transfer, reducing bandwidth usage and costs while supporting frequent, near real-time replication to meet stringent RPOs.

4. Simplified Testing and Validation

ioReplicate leverages Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) to simplify DR testing. IT teams can create snapshots of entire workloads and launch them in virtual lab environments, enabling realistic disaster simulations without disrupting production systems or requiring dedicated “lab” hardware.

The ioReplicate Advantage

  • Rapid Recovery: ioReplicate delivers recovery in just three clicks, ensuring operations are restored quickly and reliably.
  • Lower Costs: VergeOS reduces costs by integrating DR into its core platform and supporting cost-effective hardware.
  • Complete Confidence: Organizations gain the speed of purpose-built DR tools and the simplicity of frequent testing with the affordability of backup solutions, ensuring they are prepared for any disaster.

Ready to Overcome the High Cost of DR?

ioReplicate is an infrastructure-wide approach to disaster recovery that combines speed, simplicity, and cost savings into a single platform. With VergeOS, businesses no longer have to compromise between affordability and reliability. This same infrastructure-wide approach can help organizations meet day-to-day data protection and recovery requirements.

Learn more about how ioReplicate can reduce your disaster recovery costs and simplify your approach to business continuity. Download our white paper or schedule a demo today to see ioReplicate in action.

Conclusion

The high cost of disaster recovery is no longer a barrier to preparedness. With VergeOS and ioReplicate, organizations gain a powerful DR solution that delivers rapid recovery and cost savings, ensuring confidence and continuity in every scenario.

Filed Under: Protection Tagged With:

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When considering an alternative to VMware, it’s essential to elevate your infrastructure rather than simply seeking cost savings. Elevating your infrastructure means improving data protection, resiliency, and availability—critical elements that should define your next virtualization platform. In this post, we’ll explore the key features you should demand in a modern virtualization platform, and how VergeIO delivers on those expectations.

How to Elevate Your Infrastructure with Better Data Resilience

Snapshot Technology

In today’s IT environments, preparing for potential data loss, corruption, or accidental deletions is crucial. One of the most vital features in any virtualization platform is advanced snapshot technology. Traditional snapshots are often plagued by performance bottlenecks and limited retention, resulting in large gaps in protection. Many organizations are forced to take only one snapshot per day to feed their backup software, which is no longer enough.

To elevate your infrastructure, your VMware alternative should provide frequent, independent snapshots that don’t rely on redirect-on-write techniques. These snapshots should maintain system performance while allowing multiple snapshots throughout the day. This enhances Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), ensuring fast recovery when needed.

Workload Isolation

Secure workload isolation is key to protecting mission-critical workloads. Multi-tenancy ensures individual workloads are isolated for better performance and enhanced security. With an elevated infrastructure, you can place mission-critical applications in their own tenants, isolating them from less critical workloads. If ransomware attacks a user workload, it won’t spread to other tenants.

Multi-tenancy also streamlines disaster recovery (DR). By encapsulating consistent states of networking, storage, and virtual machines, the failover process becomes simpler and more reliable, improving your DR capabilities. Frequent testing becomes easier, encouraging proactive planning.

Key considerations include:

  • Robust isolation mechanisms to protect workloads.
  • Custom backup policies for each workload.
  • Encapsulated DR processes for easy recovery.

Protection from Hardware Failures

Look for a VMware alternative that can elevate your infrastructure by withstanding multiple simultaneous hardware failures. While most platforms can handle a single failure, resilient virtualization solutions keep workloads running even during multiple failures.

Look for virtualization platforms that offer self-healing capabilities to automatically reroute workloads to available hardware, ensuring minimal downtime. Solutions that provide affordable redundancy can enable high availability without requiring excessive resources.

Disaster Recovery

A comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plan is key to elevating your infrastructure. While backup solutions play a crucial role, they must be paired with automated disaster recovery capabilities. DR should be fully integrated into the platform, with failover and failback processes automated to ensure that workloads remain available during outages. Frequent DR testing without disrupting production is also essential for preparing your infrastructure for worst-case scenarios.

Importance of a Separate Backup Process for Long-Term Retention

While advanced snapshots and disaster recovery are critical, they cannot replace the need for a separate backup process to ensure compliance with the 3-2-1 backup rule. This rule mandates that organizations maintain three copies of their data: two on different storage media and one offsite.

An effective VMware alternative should integrate seamlessly with separate backup solutions that can provide long-term retention and offsite storage. This process ensures compliance, protects against ransomware, and meets legal or regulatory data retention requirements. Moreover, having a distinct backup solution enables organizations to recover data from further back in time, providing more flexibility and protection in the event of an unexpected disaster or human error.

Backup considerations include:

  • Immutable backups that cannot be modified or deleted, providing extra protection against ransomware.
  • Offsite storage for compliance with the 3-2-1 rule.
  • Long-term retention capabilities that meet regulatory and legal requirements.

VergeIO: Elevate Your Infrastructure

Among the many VMware alternatives, VergeIO stands out by offering more than just an alternative—it elevates your infrastructure, particularly in the realm of data protection and resiliency.

Elevate Your Infrastructure with Advanced IOclone Technology

VergeOS’s IOclone technology takes data protection to the next level. Unlike traditional snapshots that slow down performance and use excessive storage, IOclone creates fully independent snapshots of virtual machines, instances, or virtual data centers. Snapshots are optimized with inline deduplication, maximizing storage efficiency while maintaining high performance.

Elevate Your Infrastructure

These independent snapshots mean that even if the original data is deleted, the snapshot remains intact. This capability allows IT teams to take frequent snapshots and reduce their RPO and RTO, enabling granular recovery of full virtual data centers, individual VMs, or even specific files. Experience using snapshots for granular recovery in our hands-on lab.

Elevate Your Infrastructure with Virtual Data Centers

VergeOS provides secure multi-tenancy but takes it a step further by delivering virtual data centers for each tenant. These virtual data centers encapsulate networking, storage, and compute resources into consolidated objects, allowing complete environments to be recovered quickly during outages.

This encapsulation minimizes recovery delays, offering a more robust approach to disaster recovery by ensuring all configuration files are in sync and workloads are restored seamlessly. See how to use virtual data centers right now in our hands-on lab.

Elevate Your Infrastructure by Protecting it from Hardware Failures

VergeOS’ self-healing architecture detects failures in real-time, rerouting workloads automatically to minimize downtime. VergeOS provides affordable redundancy, ensuring high availability without the need for resource duplication.

Elevate Your Infrastructure

For greater protection, VergeOS includes ioGuardian, an integrated capability which offers inline recovery in case of catastrophic multiple simultaneous hardware failures. ioGuardian delivers missing data segments to virtual machines in real-time, enabling VMs to remain operational and saving you from resorting to your backup software.

Elevate Your Infrastructure by Exceeding the 3-2-1 Rule

While VergeOS provides robust snapshot technology and integrated disaster recovery, working with Storware ensures complete compliance with the 3-2-1 backup rule. Storware offers an advanced backup solution that integrates seamlessly with VergeOS’s snapshot capabilities, allowing organizations to meet long-term retention and offsite storage requirements.

Storware’s incremental forever backups ensure that only changed data is backed up after the initial full backup, minimizing storage use while still offering comprehensive protection. Storware also supports immutable backups, which are critical for protecting against ransomware and accidental deletions.

Conclusion: VergeIO is the Future of Virtualization

Don’t just settle for a VMware alternative that maintains the status quo. Elevate your infrastructure with VergeIO, a solution that improves snapshot technology, workload isolation, resiliency against failures, and integrated disaster recovery.

Next Steps

  • Explore more about VergeIO’s approach to data protection through our on-demand webinar “Protecting VergeOS.”
  • Experience VergeOS first-hand by signing up for our hands-on lab here.
  • Download our solution brief for an in-depth look at how VergeIO and Storware provide complete data protection.

Filed Under: Protection Tagged With: , ,

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The shared responsibility of data protection requires collaboration between infrastructure software and backup software. Both systems must work together to ensure data resiliency, protection, and recovery. Relying solely on one or the other can leave gaps, creating vulnerabilities that put critical data and operations at risk.

Learn why data protection requires shared responsibility.

In this shared responsibility model, infrastructure software (including hypervisors, storage, and networking) handles hardware failures and maintains uptime. Meanwhile, backup software safeguards against user errors and cyberattacks and ensures long-term data retention. This balanced approach ensures complete protection across all potential points of failure.

The Complexity of Modern IT Environments

Data centers today are more intricate than ever before. Enterprises rely on a combination of hypervisors, bare-metal systems, containers, and cloud services across various platforms and environments. The traditional single-backup-system approach is no longer sufficient. Businesses must implement solutions that address the unique challenges of each infrastructure component.

Infrastructure software, which manages virtual machines, networking, and storage, should provide data resilience, ensuring that workloads continue running despite multiple simultaneous hardware failures. Meanwhile, backup software protects data from soft errors—such as accidental deletions, ransomware attacks, or software bugs—and provides long-term data retention and compliance.

The shared responsibility model creates a structured way for infrastructure and backup systems to complement each other, ensuring no gaps in data protection.

On Thursday, October 3rd, at 11:00 AM ET, we will explore the shared responsibility model in greater depth and demonstrate how its two components can work together to deliver unprecedented levels of resilience, protection, and recovery.

Register here to secure your spot!

VergeOS and Storware: A Shared Responsibility for Data Protection

The collaboration between infrastructure and backup solutions is at the heart of the shared responsibility model. The integration of VergeOS and Storware provides an excellent example of an end-to-end solution for data resilience, protection, and recovery.

VergeOS: The Role of Infrastructure in Data Resiliency

VergeOS is more than just a VMware alternative. It’s an ultraconverged infrastructure consolidating the hypervisor, storage, and networking into a single piece of software. In addition to delivering a more efficient infrastructure software solution, this approach allows VergeOS to provide superior protection against hardware failures, ensuring superior uptime and resiliency.

One of VergeOS’s standout features is its IOclone technology, which creates fully independent snapshots of selected objects, such as virtual data centers, instances, or virtual machines. Unlike traditional snapshots that rely on the redirect-on-write method, VergeOS’s IOclone ensures that snapshots are independent of the original object. If the original object is deleted, the snapshot remains intact and can be restored.

VergeOS also incorporates integrated deduplication, making snapshots highly efficient in terms of storage capacity consumption. This enables businesses to keep thousands of snapshots over long periods without any performance degradation.

In addition, VergeOS features ioGuardian, a real-time recovery solution that activates during multiple hardware failures. With inline recovery, ioGuardian provides missing data segments to virtual machines in real time, preventing downtime even during catastrophic failures. This ensures infrastructure resiliency, addressing gaps that often occur when infrastructure systems rely too heavily on backup systems for recovery.

Storware: The Role of Backup in Data Protection and Recovery

While VergeOS handles hardware-level protection and resiliency, Storware ensures data is safeguarded from user errors, accidental deletions, and ransomware attacks. Storware’s backup solution supports KVM-based hypervisors (including VergeOS), bare-metal systems, containers, and cloud environments such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Storware’s two-stage backup architecture offers scalability and flexibility in data protection. In the first stage, Storware collects data from multiple sources and stores it temporarily in Storware nodes. These nodes can scale to meet increasing capacity or performance demands.

In the second stage, the data is transferred to a final repository, which could include object storage, file systems (NFS or SMB), enterprise-grade storage (such as Dell EMC Data Domain or HPE StoreOnce), or even tape libraries for organizations that need offline data storage.

Storware’s support for incremental forever backups captures only changes after the initial backup, reducing backup times and network strain. Additionally, Storware performs data consolidation in the staging area, ensuring that recoveries are full-speed, even when multiple incremental backups are involved.

When integrated with VergeOS, Storware leverages Change Block Tracking (CBT) technology to optimize backup efficiency by minimizing the amount of data transferred over the network.

Why the Shared Responsibility Model is Crucial for Modern Businesses

The partnership between VergeOS and Storware highlights the power of the shared responsibility model. Together, they provide comprehensive protection across all failure points—whether hardware-related or human error.

Organizations relying solely on backup software for all data protection risk gaps in infrastructure resiliency. Conversely, relying only on infrastructure software without a dedicated backup strategy can make meeting compliance or data protection best practices demands challenging. The shared responsibility model ensures that both systems—infrastructure and backup—work together harmoniously.

With VergeOS managing uptime and resiliency during hardware failures and Storware protecting against soft errors and enabling long-term retention, businesses can be confident that their data is fully protected. This holistic approach is particularly crucial for organizations managing multi-tenant environments, hybrid cloud infrastructures, or complex virtualized systems, where any failure can lead to severe consequences.

Conclusion: Shared Responsibility Equals Stronger Protection

Modern IT environments are vital to an organization’s success and demand a comprehensive approach to data protection. By adopting the shared responsibility model, organizations can ensure that infrastructure and backup systems work together to provide seamless data resiliency, protection, and recovery.

The collaboration between VergeOS and Storware exemplifies this model in action. VergeOS protects infrastructure from hardware failures and ensures uptime, while Storware safeguards data against soft errors and provides long-term retention. Together, they offer a turnkey solution that helps businesses of all sizes protect their most valuable asset—their data.

Join Our Webinar: How to Protect VMware Alternatives with VergeIO and Storware
Interested in learning more about how infrastructure and backup software can work together to safeguard your data? Join us for a live webinar, “How to Protect VMware Alternatives with VergeIO and Storware,” where we’ll explore these concepts further and demonstrate how the two solutions integrate seamlessly.

  • Date: Thursday, October 3rd, 2024

  • Time: 11:00 AM ET / 8:00 AM PT

  • Duration: 30 minutes + Q&A
    Register here~ to secure your spot!

Filed Under: Blog, Protection Tagged With: , ,

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IT professionals considering a hypervisor alternative to reduce costs must also focus on minimizing VMware migration downtime. The requirements for reducing migration downtime extend beyond automated copying and conversion of VMware virtual machines (VMs). Essential steps for reducing VMware migration downtime include:

  1. Seamless pre-preparation of the target hypervisor
  2. Fast identification and complete copying of VMs
  3. Rapid conversion of VMs in seconds, not minutes
  4. Scalable testing of converted VMs
  5. Frequent updating of migrated VMs
  6. Extending migration to VMware DR

Seamless Pre-Preparation of the Target Hypervisor

Minimizing VMware migration downtime

The first step in minimizing VMware migration downtime is preparing the target hypervisor. This involves allocating hardware and getting the hypervisor up and running. Look for hypervisors that can run on existing hardware, particularly those that can operate on older servers that are no longer supported by VMware but are still viable.

Hypervisor vendors offering turnkey hardware and software solutions are less desirable due to added expenses. Even if they provide loaned hardware or extended terms, the duration may not suffice for thoroughly vetting their solution and completing the migration.

Fast Identification and Complete Copying of VMs

Minimizing VMware migration downtime hinges on the speed of initially seeding eligible VMs to the target hypervisor. Opt for solutions with integrated migration functions, avoiding separate or third-party applications. While transfer speeds depend on VM storage requirements and network speed, separate modules can negatively impact transfer times.

Minimizing VMware migration downtime

Ideally, the solution should log directly into vCenter and list VMs available for migration. You should be able to select which VMs to migrate individually or in groups. The migration function should use VMware’s backup APIs for the fastest possible transfer, ensuring all VM data, including configuration information, is captured.

The target hypervisor should initially maintain VMs in their VMware format without converting them on the fly, which would slow transfers. This approach provides an additional checkpoint or backup copy if something goes wrong during testing. The hypervisor should also have integrated deduplication to minimize storage capacity usage for VM backups.

Rapid Conversion of Migrated VMs

Once VM data is transferred, conversion to the new hypervisor format should be quick, taking seconds rather than minutes. During testing, the conversion time is critical. If it takes five minutes per VM, a 100 VM environment would take over eight hours to load for testing.

VergeIO has demonstrated converting VMs in seconds. For example, in the video below, we show how to convert 10 VMs in 10 seconds.

Scalable Testing of Migrated VMs

Reducing VMware migration downtime also requires scalable testing of converted VMs. Efficient and thorough testing reduces the need for frequent data reloads and surprises in production. Multi-tenancy and a robust snapshot capability are critical for creating a scalable testing environment.

With multi-tenancy in place, during conversion, IT can place all converted VMs into a tenant or create tenants by workload, department, or IT team specialty. With the robust snapshot function and deduplication integrated into the hypervisor, IT can instantly create multiple clones of each tenant without consuming capacity or impacting performance. The result is space-efficient “virtual labs” for testing purposes. Each tenant snapshot can be assigned to different teams for testing without fear of one group’s work impacting another.

Frequent Updating of Migrated VMs

Minimizing VMware migration downtime

In typical testing, IT copies a group of VMs to the alternative hypervisor, tests them for compatibility, and performs a final copy before conversion. The source VMware VM often needs to be down during this final transfer, resulting in multiple minutes, if not more, of downtime per VM, leading to hours of total outage.

Minimizing VMware migration downtime requires an alternative hypervisor solution that allows frequent updates of copied VMs via granular data transfer methods like change block tracking (CBT). CBT enables frequent updates of copied VMs, each taking only a few minutes. This approach allows IT to perform tests, verify compatibility, and finalize updates with minimal outages.

Extending VMware Migration to DR

The combination of fast initial transfers, frequent granular updates, and rapid conversion makes the alternative hypervisor an ideal VMware DR solution. VM copies are updated more frequently than typical backups, and the target environment is more robust and production-capable than typical backup storage appliances. Using the VMware alternative for DR provides value until the final cutover.

The 7-minute whiteboard session below explains how to design and use VergeOS for the VMware DR use case.

VergeOS for VMware Migration and DR

VergeOS meets all the requirements with its integrated storage, virtualization, and networking services. It runs on various server hardware, enabling IT to repurpose older hardware for staging or DR environments. VergeOS ioMigrate leverages VMware’s backup API for fast VM copying, maintaining a protected copy for testing.

VergeOS converts VMs quickly, as shown in the video, where 10 VMs are converted in 10 seconds. Its Virtual Data Center technology enables scalable testing, allowing multiple secure virtual labs to be created in seconds. ioMigrate uses VMware Backup APIs for efficient VM repository updates, making VergeOS an ideal DR solution that is better than array-based replication while testing the platform’s functionality.

Conclusion

Minimizing VMware migration downtime is crucial for IT professionals seeking cost-effective hypervisor alternatives. Achieving this requires seamless preparation of the target hypervisor, fast and complete VM copying, rapid conversion, scalable testing, and frequent updates. VergeOS addresses all these needs with its integrated ioMigrate and ioProtect capabilities, ensuring efficient and quick migration while minimizing downtime.

VergeOS offers a robust migration and disaster recovery solution, allowing organizations to repurpose existing hardware, maintain VM integrity during testing, and leverage frequent updates for smooth transitions. By adopting VergeOS, IT departments can reduce migration downtime and enhance their overall DR strategy, adding significant value to their infrastructure.

To watch a full scale test of our VMware Migration and VMware DR capabilities watch our on-demand, registration-free webinar: “Comparing VMware DR Strategies“

Filed Under: VMwareExit Tagged With: ,

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VMware DR Tools Assessment

The list of threats to data center operations never stops growing, and IT professionals must periodically perform a VMware DR Tools Assessment. During these assessments, they should evaluate tools to:

  1. Address new data center threats
  2. Improve Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives (RPO/RTO)
  3. Simplify recovery processes
  4. Reduce costs

Generally, there are three types of tools that IT relies on to meet its organization’s requirements:

  • Backup and Recovery
  • Array-based Replication
  • Infrastructure-wide Replication

These tools lay the foundation for a disaster recovery strategy. They directly impact RPO, RTO, and affordability.

Backup And RecoveryArray-Based ReplicationInfrastructure-Wide Replication
Holistic ProtectionGoodPoorExcellent
RTO AttainmentGoodExcellentExcellent
RPO AttainmentPoorPoorExcellent
Hypervisor TransitionGoodPoorExcellent
DR OperationsPoorPoorExcellent
Cost$$$$$$$$
Comparing VMware DR Strategies

Live Webinar and Demonstration: “Comparing VMware DR Strategies” — Register Now

Meeting Classic VMware DR Threats

It is critical during a VMware DR tools assessment that IT ensures they address the classic types of threats to a VMware environment, such as floods, tornadoes, and power outages, which persist alongside the more recent threat of ransomware. IT needs to look for ways to improve RPO/RTO, simplify the recovery process, and also look for opportunities to lower DR costs.

Backup and recovery solutions are considered the least expensive option but also the least seamless in terms of recovery. While most solutions can recover a few virtual machines (VMs) on backup appliances, these appliances are not designed for the long-term hosting of many VMs. Backup and recovery tools have improved their resiliency to ransomware, with some now offering automated remote site recovery, but most still can’t detect an attack, so prolonged recoveries are commonplace, even with excellent backup strategies.

The critical challenge for backup and recovery is the time between protection events, often failing to meet increasingly strict organizational RPOs. An “aggressive” strategy of four hours may not be sufficient to meet organizational service level agreements (SLA). The time it takes to reposition data on production servers means that backup and recovery often fail to meet most organizational RTOs. Once the total cost of backup infrastructure (software licensing, dedicated storage hardware, compute server requirements at the DR site) is evaluated, the theoretical cost advantage of backup and recovery often dissipates.

Array-based replication is relatively seamless in transporting data to a DR site, but the target array at the DR site must be nearly identical to the primary site’s array. Dedicated arrays also can’t host VMs, so the customer must equip and manage server infrastructure at the DR site. Like backup and recovery, array-based replication doesn’t capture details that are not on the actual array, such as network configurations and VM settings.

Array-based replication provides a much more frequent protection event capability than a backup but is myopically focused on its data. If all data, including boot and configuration files, are on a single dedicated array, then array-based replication meets most organizations’ RTO demands. However, if data is on boot drives, network hardware, or different types of dedicated storage arrays, IT must ensure consistency between them. This often places them outside of the RPO. Another concern is the high cost of buying dual dedicated arrays, which places the strategy outside the budget of most organizations.

Infrastructure-wide replication encapsulates the entire infrastructure, capturing everything into a single object. It provides a complete, self-contained environment. The servers at the DR site can simultaneously run VMs and their data and network functionality such as firewalls and routing. Infrastructure replication, like VergeIO’s ioProtect, enables IT to create a turnkey pod easily deployed in the DR site. Since it is self-contained, there is no need to worry about consistency across networking and storage. Infrastructure replication meets and exceeds most organizations’ RPOs and RTOs. The consolidation also makes deployment extremely cost-effective.

Meeting New VMware DR Threats

VMware DR Tools Assessment

A critical part of a VMware DR tools assessment is making sure the tool can withstand new threats and use cases. While ransomware and natural disasters like fire, flood, and hurricanes remain top concerns, today, customers also want to ensure they are not locked into a particular hypervisor. Broadcom’s recent acquisition of VMware has shown IT professionals that licensing costs can increase quickly and dramatically. Broadcom’s delay tactics in providing renewal quotes only exacerbates this problem, leaving customers less time to transition. In addition to meeting the classic DR needs, modern VMware DR tools need to be able to help customers move to another hypervisor seamlessly at the click of a button.

These tools must provide proper backup and disaster recovery, continuously updating the DR environment while supporting the movement of VMs to an alternate hypervisor. Ensuring the secondary environment is current enables customers to verify VM functionality before a renewal surprise.

Backup and recovery solutions can provide some of this functionality, assuming they can restore “into” other hypervisors. However, most can’t. IT professionals must restore their VMs under the original hypervisor and manually convert them, often using a separate utility. The process is time-consuming and makes pre-disaster test verification challenging.

Array-based replication has almost no value in helping customers prepare for transitioning to other hypervisors since most alternative hypervisors can’t access VMware’s proprietary format.

Infrastructure-wide replication solutions may be the best suited for the “business” type of disaster, assuming they offer more than just one-time migration. For example, VergeIO’s ioProtect can continuously protect the VMware environment. IT logs ioProtect directly into vCenter and keeps copies updated quickly, thanks to change block tracking. Data is stored in the VMware format if IT needs it for a one-off recovery. When the “disaster” is a surprisingly more expensive renewal quote, customers can convert to the alternative hypervisor within seconds. The rapid transition makes testing DR and experimenting with a new hypervisor painless.

Conclusion

When performing a VMware DR tools assessment, backup and recovery is often considered the most cost-effective and manual of the available disaster recovery tools. IT must restore data to a new environment; that transfer takes time. Backup also may not protect all the extraneous files in the environment unless specifically pointed at them. Some solutions can help customers transition between hypervisors. Still, most can only restore a VM in its original format, requiring the customer to import the VM into the new environment manually.

Array-based replication is the most expensive option. Although it provides near-seamless replication between arrays, those arrays often must be identical. Additionally, any data or configuration files not on the array must be protected and recovered separately. Lastly, it does little to empower customers to move to or test another hypervisor.

Test Drive VergeOS Now

Infrastructure replication checks all the boxes. It provides cost-effective and simple recovery in classic disaster scenarios and, with the right migration capabilities, can assist customers when and if they need to move quickly to another hypervisor. It also provides a very high “first-try” success rate on both declared disasters and tests.

To learn more about infrastructure replication and how it compares to other disaster recovery strategies, join us for our live webinar, “Comparing VMware Disaster Recovery Strategies.”

Filed Under: Protection Tagged With: , ,

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While instant recovery was a critical step forward, customers are now looking for an instant recovery upgrade. The next advancement of recovery needs to maintain its point-in-time independence while shrinking recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO). Traditional methods of data recovery can often lead to significant downtime, disrupt business operations, and lead to potential revenue loss. Instant recovery has filled that gap for a decade, but now customers need more. VergeOS’ ioGuardian for VergeOS is changing the landscape by offering real-time data recovery.

Understanding Real-time Recovery with ioGuardian

ioGuardian for VergeOS is a backup solution integrated into VergeOS. It is an instant recovery upgrade. Unlike conventional backup software, it offers inline recovery capabilities that ensure continuous data access, even in scenarios where traditional hardware failure protections fail, such as during multiple drive or node failures. Even instant recovery might cause delays, but ioGuardian delivers missing data segments to virtual machines (VMs) inline, enabling operations to continue without downtime.

One of ioGuardian’s key benefits is its ability to tighten RPOs and RTOs. It achieves this through the use of VergeOS snapshots, which can be executed frequently based on the customer’s needs, ensuring more regular data protection and inline recovery. This approach enables ioGuardian to provide real-time recovery of missing data segments, ensuring VMs can continue their operations seamlessly without crashing or requiring a separate recovery process. These capabilities are included in VergeOS at no additional charge other than licensing the server used for ioGuardian.

Setting Up Real-time Recovery

An Instant Recovery Upgrade

The setup for ioGuardian involves configuring a dedicated server as the ioGuardian target, which can be an older, repurposed server or storage system capable of running VergeOS. It runs outside the production instance and represents a third copy of data beyond the protections built-in to the production VergeOS instance. Since it is also running VergeOS, it also provides global inline deduplication, so the storage capacity needed for the ioGuardian server is optimized, allowing for reduced data transfer and footprint. Additionally, placing an ioGuardian server on-premises and at a remote location can enhance data recovery efforts by providing access to data blocks from multiple sources if needed.

Comparing Instant Recovery to Real-time Recovery

While there are a lot of rapid recovery technologies on the market, instant recovery was the former state-of-the-art. The concept offered by several backup vendors aims to quickly re-instantiate a VM on a backup appliance. While this method can be effective, it typically requires downtime for the VM to restart on the backup appliance. It is also hosted on the backup appliance, which might not offer the same performance as the primary system to the point that even though recovery is “instant,” performance is so bad that IT can’t use it.

Moreover, instant recovery often involves manual intervention from IT staff due to limitations in how often entire environments are protected and how available the IT team is. The actual RTO could range between four to eight hours. Also, instant recovery requires another manual intervention for IT to move the VM back into the production environment eventually. This may also cause an outage while the movement occurs.

When the drives are replaced, instant recovery does not aid in restoring those drives. Recovery requires a manual and complete restoration of the impacted volumes. Even a RAID rebuild will likely not work, and if it does, it will be very time-consuming and extract a performance toll.

An Instant Recovery Upgrade

As an instant recovery upgrade, ioGuardian’s inline recovery method introduces potentially no downtime. It provides the missing data segments to VMs in real-time, bypassing the need for IT intervention and achieving an instant RTO with an RPO of minutes. Furthermore, VMs continue running from the primary production hardware, avoiding the performance drawbacks of running on a backup appliance. As a result, an outage to move the VM back to the production environment is eliminated. Lastly, when the failed drives are replaced, the ioGuardian server rebuilds the data on those drives automatically, avoiding further restoration or time-consuming RAID rebuilds.

Conclusion

The real-time and instant data recovery comparison highlights the advanced capabilities and benefits of inline recovery solutions like ioGuardian for VergeOS. IoGuardian sets a new data backup and recovery standard by providing real-time data recovery without downtime or manual IT intervention. As businesses rely heavily on their data, adopting innovative recovery solutions while keeping costs in check will ensure operational continuity and resilience in the face of data loss challenges.

To learn more, register for our upcoming webinar, “Can Your Hypervisor Do This? Real-Time and Inline Data Recovery” We spotlight VergeOS’s ioGuardian capabilities, challenging the status quo of hypervisor functionality. Learn what it would take and how much it would cost for other hypervisors to deliver similar capabilities. We will also demonstrate live how ioGuardian delivers missing data segments to virtual machines (VMs), maintaining continuous operations even during multiple simultaneous hardware failures.

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