Keep Calm and Converge On – Rage Against the Accidental Backup Architecture

So you’ve taken the leap. At this point you’re probably at least 90% virtualized and climbing. And you’ve converged your infrastructure so you’re no longer operating in a world of vertical stovepipes across your storage, compute, network, and virtualization layer. Alongside many of your peers in the industry, you prefer a fully-integrated solution as your path to the cloud and you’re not afraid to Defy (VMworld pun intended) traditional architecture of rolling your own solution.

Infrastructure Shift Towards Convergence

But what about your data protection storage? Do you have an architecture that’s designed to integrate with your converged environment? Or is your backup and recovery an accidental architecture of sorts, where applications and virtual machines are protected haphazardly based on needs of siloed IT application owners, database administrators, and virtual machine administrators. Where the strategy may be BYOB (bring your own backup) instead of an intentional strategy.

Backup administrators – this is your call to action. You can “keep calm and converge on” in the hands of the VCE solution and EMC backup and archive technology.

That’s because EMC backup and archive is, by design, an intentional protection storage architecture that’s perfect for an intentional converged infrastructure, like your VCE Vblock Systems. Time to erase an accidental data protection architecture from your vocabulary.

Easy Button

EMC backup and archive for your Vblock Systems is anything but accidental. EMC software and purpose-built backup appliance solutions, EMC Avamar and EMC Data Domain systems, are optimized for highly virtualized environments like the Vblock System, and supported by great partner products from Cisco, VMware, Intel and EMC. Because of a strong coupling to virtualization in a converged solution, backup and recovery must be optimized for a virtual environment; the Vblock System has baked optimized backup and recovery right into VCE’s Data Protection solution powered by EMC technology.

All you have to do to press the easy button is implement VCE backup and recovery solutions with your Vblock System purchase. Not only are VCE backup and recovery solutions pre-configured, pre-integrated, and pre-tested to work across all hardware and software components in the Vblock System, they also are built right into the VCE cabinetry with 10 Gig-E cable direct connects, so setting up a secondary backup network is no longer necessary and you can eliminate backup resource contention. VCE serves as a single point of installation and support for the entire integrated solution, backup and recovery included—by deploying VCE’s solution, you therefore end up with a simplified management strategy across your architecture, while taking advantage of leading edge technologies from individual vendors like EMC.

Backup and Recovery

With EMC backup and recovery for the Vblock System, your de-duplicated backups (both for physical and virtual environments) can be workload and use case optimized to fit the needs of your data center, with flexible targets of the Avamar Data Store or Data Domain Systems.  And with tight coupling to your virtual environment through VMware’s vStorage API for Data Protection, Avamar allows you to not only protect your business critical applications running on your virtual infrastructure by setting up application specific backup agents, but also by setting up backup proxy virtual machines to offload your backup jobs away from your production environment and universal proxy server load balancing to ensure backup processes are evenly distributed across these virtual machine proxies.

With Avamar, restore is a snap. Through tight coupling with VMware (vStorage API for Data Protection), Avamar agents leverage Changed Block Tracking (CBT) backup and restore so that you are only sending unique “changed” blocks across the network; this allows you to recover 30x faster than traditional VMDK restore (you can learn more about Avamar here).

What’s not to love about a simple, best-in-class backup and recovery architecture to protect your Vblock Systems? That’s rhetorical, obviously. At the risk of using a double negative, there’s nothing NOT to like.

So go ahead, push the easy button on backup and recovery with VCE and EMC so that you can keep calm and converge on.

For more information:

  • Replay EMC Backup Recovery Systems’ EMC World session on Avamar and Data Domain for a VCE Vblock System.
  • Download the white paper written by expert industry senior analyst Jason Buffington from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).
  • Watch Jason sum up data protection of a virtualized, converged environment in a short video.
  • Learn how you can transform your data protection with a solution that’s optimized for virtual environments from our webcast.

Hear Steve Rayda, CTO of Purdue Pharma, discuss how EMC backup and recovery solutions was instrumental in transforming and accelerating his Vblock Systems infrastructure.

About the Author: Chandra Jacobs