Storage/Business Continuity
Business continuity virtualized
Appliance addresses the challenges of protecting VMware environments.
Three years ago, when UGL Unicco (Unicco) installed a business-continuity appliance to protect its critical data, the company sought a policy-based solution that could easily manage backup, archive and disaster recovery functions. In particular, Unicco wanted a solution that was platform neutral and LAN-friendly.
More recently, when Unicco completed virtualization of its environment, the IT team sought a backup appliance to protect its virtualized data in much the same way the previous backup appliance performed. Darrell Stymiest, Unicco's network services manager, found that STORServer offered such a solution and opted to employ the STORServer appliance for VMware Consolidated Backup. The appliance is designed to protect vulnerable VMware environments.
For more than half a century, Unicco, located in Newton, Mass., has delivered facilities maintenance services to customers in a wide variety of markets, including corporate/commercial, education, retail and government. Unicco employs more than 18,000 people and has a 95 percent customer retention rate.
The new appliance houses in one box all the hardware and software needed for consolidated backup, disaster recovery and archiving capabilities. The turnkey solution uses VMware Consolidated Backup to centralize the backup of Unicco's virtual machines on ESX servers to the business-continuity appliance. Backing up to the appliance eliminates Unicco's need to have individual backup agents on each virtual and/or host machine. Unicco is currently backing up a total of 85 virtual servers and about 20 physical servers.
VMware Consolidated Backup contains a set of utilities that provide for file-level and full-machine backup of a virtual environment. They integrate with most popular backup solutions and require a proxy server to offload the physical and virtual machines. The issue that many users have is that they require scripts to be written to schedule the backups, which can be difficult to write and maintain on an ongoing basis. Stymiest says Unicco would not have tried this on its own.
The STORServer Agent for VMware Consolidated Backup helps Stymiest address the challenges of protecting VMware environments. The agent controls the backup for each of Unicco's virtual machines by integrating the VMware Consolidated Backup utilities provided by VMware and the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) backup-archive client. The agent mounts the snapshot to the STORServer appliance and calls the TSM backup-archive client to perform either an incremental file-level backup or a full-image backup. The data is stored in the STORServer storage pools.
"One of the features of the agent I like most is its ability to perform multiple concurrent snapshots to more than one mount point," says Stymiest. "The virtual machine snapshot technology eliminates virtual server downtime during backup. Our virtual machines continue to operate without interruption while the backups take place, which is a huge time saver.
"The greatest feeling is knowing that we are totally covered from a disaster-recovery perspective," he adds. "The daily automated generation of a customized server disaster-recovery plan saves us a lot of time in restoration. Part of our DR plan is to snapshot all servers and back them up with the appliance."
Most of Unicco's savings have been in terms of time. Before implementing STORServer's solutions, Unicco's main challenge was dealing with multiple tapes and systems. Most of the restores that could be done were for the previous day, and IT staff spent up to eight hours a week backing up systems and restore times. Now, regular backups take less than 10 minutes a day and less than an hour for the entire week.
"Our old way of backing up data was on tape, and we're now all disk to disk," says Stymiest. "During the day, STORServer sends our data out to tape for disaster recovery, which greatly reduces our backup window. It now takes less than five minutes to restore data. With the current setup, there is a 100 percent chance that, in the case of a restore, I will be able to get my server back to where it was."
For more information from STORServer:
(click here)