virtual machines

‘Race to Recovery’ Taking VMworld 2011 by Storm

August 31, 2011

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

If you have been following this blog or Syncsort’s Twitter feed over the last week or so, you have no doubt heard of the ‘Race to Recovery’ challenge we’ve been running in our booth at VMworld 2011. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth? All joking aside, the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution is so easy to use that show attendees that have never used it before are recovering virtual machines in record-setting times after sitting through only 3 or 4 minutes of “training.”

Through the first two days of the show, the current record stands at 1 minute and 8 seconds. Don’t take my word for it, check out the following video. For those of you attending VMworld 2011, don’t forget to swing by booth #527 for your chance to compete. While setting the new record and obtaining bragging rights is the ultimate goal, you can still walk away with an iPad 2 for scoring the best time of the day. Game on!

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Syncsort Announces Data Protection 4.0

August 30, 2011

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

As usual, VMworld started with a bang. The first night at the welcome reception is always the craziest. Nearly all the attendees wander the show floor simultaneously and there is a great buzz in the air (having a rock band playing not too far away only added to the noise and excitement!).  

The first three hours of VMworld 2011 were packed with non-stop action in the Syncsort booth.  We talked to literally hundreds of customers and propsects in that brief period of time, and ran at least five or six showings of our ‘Race to Recovery’ challenge (tell you the truth, it was so busy I can’t even remember the exact number of times we ran the Race – and I’m one of the presenters!).

Tuesday at the show, news takes the spotlight as Syncsort announces the upcoming release of Syncsort Data Protection 4.0, a key component of the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution that we are demonstrating at booth #527. Here is a quick rundown of what’s new in the release:

  • Agentless VMware backup support. This provides management and ease-of-use benefits to users by letting them more easily protect virtual machines. (While Agentless backup has its place, we still think agents are important for some use cases – more on that in an upcoming blog post!)
  • Rapid VM recovery from Agentless backups. We are bringing our patented Instant Virtualization technology to the Agentless space, allowing you to restore entire VMs in less than two minutes.
  • Remote backup enhancements to better enable cloud deployments, for both private and public clouds.
  • Enhancements to storage efficiency (squeezing out even more disk savings) and backup management (major reductions in backup job overhead).
  • A new, improved user experience in terms of both user interface and documentation.

Version 4.0 is scheduled to ship within 90 days from today. Once we get past VMworld and all the non-stop activity, I’ll be blogging more about the details of these new features. We are also announcing today that EVO Merchant Services, the largest privately-held credit card processor, is using NSB to reduce backup and recovery complexity. EVO uses NSB to protect its mixed environment of 250+ physical and virtual servers.

Meanwhile, you can stop by our booth and see for yourself, and maybe even run a recovery as part of the ‘Race to Recovery.’  Last night, our iPad 2 winner was Sean Bettencourt, who recovered a VM in a blazing 1 minute and 12 seconds! Not bad for never having even touched the product before.

Yes, it’s really that simple to use, and that fast.  We’re giving away another iPad 2 today, so check the demo schedule at the booth and see if you can’t be today’s ‘Race to Recovery’ winner.

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P2V Migration in 10 Minutes

June 29, 2011

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

We are all on the road to virtualization, that’s no secret. Some organizations are already 100% virtualized, others nowhere near that.  This post is for those that are still on their way.

The journey toward virtualization begins with taking the physical systems you have today and converting them to virtual machines. The market is crowded with tools to help you with this task, but I think NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) offers some interesting differences, which we announced today in a press release.

To start, NSB is not simply a physical-to-virtual (P2V) tool. It’s a fully fledged data protection product that also happens to provide P2V functionality (at no additional cost). So the NSB migration process begins with backups of your physical systems. This provides an immediate benefit of allowing you to test a migration before you actually migrate the application, because you run it off the backup copy. If you’re concerned about performance, you can keep your physical app up and running at the same time that you create a new virtual machine of that app, which you can then put through its paces to make sure it meets your performance objectives. This gives you time to tweak the system to understand the optimal configuration settings.

Once that’s done, the really cool part comes into play. It’s time to finally migrate that application for good. How long will it take?  The obvious answer is “it depends on how much data you have to migrate.”  To get a sense of how long it was taking users, Syncsort commissioned eWEEK to survey over 100 users who had performed P2V migrations and the median response was 5 to 7 hours to migrate a system, with over 30% of users saying it takes over 11 hours. That’s a significant amount of time for an application to be offline (not to mention it may translate into a lot of weekends at work).

But with NSB leveraging the magic of NetApp snapshots, that migration time can be as little as ten minutes.  How does that happen? This process works like this. First, you shut down the physical application and run a final backup (since this is a block-level incremental backup, it should only take a few minutes). Then you start the migration process. You can have this pre-configured as a “job” so there is no setup time. You just hit the “go” button.  

NSB talks to your VMware environment to create the new virtual machine based on characteristics you’ve entered. That final backup image is then made accessible as a NetApp Flexclone image, which gets mapped to your VMware environment. The new VM now boots off the clone. This entire process takes about ten minutes, with some natural variation based on network and system performance.  

The application boots up and you are back in business. But you haven’t actually migrated the system yet!  This takes place in the background. While the VM is running off the clone, data is transferred to a designated data store and a new VMDK file created.  When that is completed, the VMware Storage vMotion process is invoked to switch from the clone to the newly created data store. This happens without any need for application downtime.

The bottom line is that NSB lets you complete your P2V migrations with minimal downtime and maximum assurance (because you can test the migration before you migrate). Further, if it does turn out that a particular application just isn’t working out as a virtual machine, NSB gives you an easy way to move it back to a physical machine.

If you’d like to see some of this in action, you can view the video here and more details are also available in a solution sheet. Still have questions? Leave a comment and I’ll do my best to get you a timely response.

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“Recovery without Compromise” in Focus at 360°IT in London

September 23, 2010

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

I’ve been spending the week in London.  Yesterday and today have been spent at the 360°IT conference being held at Earl’s Court. I spoke today on the topic of “Recovery without Compromise,” a subject that gets right to the heart of what we do at Syncsort. We’ve been having many conversations on that topic at the show, and I’d like to share two of them.

The first was with two gentlemen from a FTSE 100 company, a large organization that is now making the move to virtual servers (like who isn’t?). On the physical side, they are still using a somewhat creaky old school backup-to-tape solution. But on the virtual side, they are using… nothing! They know their old tool won’t work, and they haven’t decided what to use on their VMs. Meanwhile, data goes unprotected.

This is a surprisingly common response when it comes to backing up virtual machines.  IT departments – even large and sophisticated ones from major corporations – are struggling with VM backup. That’s why at Syncsort we have focused so much of our efforts on a backup model that is low impact and fast, making virtual machine protection rapid and efficient. Efficiency is key when you are sharing hardware resources across multiple applications.

The other conversation was with two gents in a very different, yet very similar, situation. They work for a small company that is growing very rapidly. In fact, until recently, this firm didn’t even have an IT department. It’s a software company, and the engineers  were playing the role of IT.  That worked ok for a while, but they have since grown to over 100 servers (no SAN) and for data protection they are using…. nothing!  The guys we were speaking with were the new IT department. They are looking into virtualization – to cut down the number of servers – and of course data protection.

Two very different companies, but both with a serious data protection challenge. The common theme between both is “newness.”  For the large organization, data protection has been working for years, but not in the new virtual environment. For the small organization, everything is new. And in both cases, the server deployments have gotten out ahead of data protection.  A not uncommon situation.

That’s why planning is so important. If you’re looking at virtualization, it’s critical that you make data protection and recovery part of your designs. It’s much smarter to get the right solution in place from the start, and it will be far more cost effective in the long run. 

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