Backup and recovery is one area where IT managers and CIOs should be able to turn on cruise control and stop worrying, says Warren Olivier, Veeam software regional manager for southern Africa.
"The single most important step you can take when backing up a virtual environment is to use a tool designed specifically for virtualisation. It's tempting to try and economise by keeping an old agent-based backup solution going, but the cost is measured in wasted time, frustration and the possibility of failed backups," he says.
"Any backup agent can only 'see' the machine it's deployed on, and can't tell the difference between virtual and physical machines. As a result, it can be fooled into thinking things are OK when they aren't - and can fool you in turn."
When someone accidentally deletes a file, restoring just that file is exactly what you want, adds Olivier. But what if someone accidentally deletes an entire server? he asks.
"With virtualisation, that can happen - and in that case, you need to restore the whole thing as quickly as possible, not rebuild and then restore files," he says. "And if your hardware dies mid-stream - which also happens - you want to be able to restore entire applications and databases in a way that's transactionally consistent. Speed is also of the essence - restoration should happen in minutes."
According to Olivier, it's also important to test backups so that you can be assured that you can successfully restore your information without errors. These days, he says, automated backup testing is easy to do if you have a virtualised environment, so it should be a non-negotiable requirement.
"When you can restore from a backup quickly and easily, new things become possible. For example, why build a separate development or testing environment when you can clone your production environment and run everything in there?"
Before going live with any system changes, Olivier says organisation can now test them on a version of the production environment that's less than an hour old, if they want to. That means more accurate testing and shorter development cycles.
"By simply implementing a few of these best practice procedures, backup and recovery should be a breeze," he concludes.
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