Companies that virtualise but continue to do physical backups face inefficient systems and other challenges, says Doug Hazelman, Veeam VP of product strategy and chief evangelist.
"Most IT shops that virtualised without changing their backup processes have discovered their backups are now taking longer than they did when all their servers were physical, opening the door to backup solutions specifically built for virtualisation environments," explains Hazelman.
These backups are taking longer because companies that have virtualised systems continue to do physical backups, "installing an agent on every server, which does a file-level backup", Hazelman notes. "With virtualisation, that begins to break, because you now have 10 virtual machines running on one box using the same resources. You try to back up, and it brings everything to a halt."
"Retrofitting your current physical backup solution to take control of your virtual environment does not work, as the current solution is designed for physical systems, and does not or cannot take advantage of all the additional features and opportunities that are present in virtualisation," adds Warren Olivier, territory manager at Veeam SA.
"The advantage of virtualisation is that a virtual machine is essentially nothing but files on disk; it's better to back up as an image than to physical disk," says Hazelman.
Properly designed backup systems are gaining in importance because virtualisation is reaching a tipping point in SA, says Olivier, with new workloads being deployed virtually rather than physically.
Local factors such as strikes and bandwidth costs are in many ways driving faster adoption of virtualisation in SA, he says. "Some trends are actually happening faster in SA than in other countries due to the South African economic landscape and current infrastructure limitations around bandwidth in Africa.
"For example, because of virtualisation, a customer can very easily test recoverability of the IT environments, or better yet, customer information. In the same breath, the technology allows for greater use of poorer bandwidth by taking advantage of new features provided by the technology, as long as the right tool is used."
However, many businesses are still immature when it comes to taking advantage of all the benefits of virtualisation, says Olivier, with virtual backup being a feature that can help to attain the full promise of virtualisation. "This is beginning to change, as companies start to realise that selecting the right tool for the job is imperative and will only get them to see their return on investment quicker, while increasing overall efficiency and reliability within the business."
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