Hyperconverged and web scale infrastructures are inherently robust. Built-in redundancies and replication mean component failures are almost transparent; processing and storage simply shifts to another node. Despite this, data backups are still required. Redundancy and replication don’t protect you from user errors that require recovering accidentally deleted files, eliminate compliance requirements to maintain several years of historic data, or malware that corrupts or locks up your files.
In fact, hyperconverged and web scale infrastructures can add to the challenge of backups. The sheer scale of these systems mean backups take longer. Developing an optimized backup strategy is necessary to cope with the scale and minimize any impact on application performance.
Virtualization Should Change Your Backup Strategy
Backups in the virtualized, hyperconverged world requires changing how you think about backups. Applications ran on specific servers, and specific storage was allocated to that server. Getting a consistent backup affected only those specific devices and those specific applications.
Today’s virtualized environments mean that volumes hold data from multiple virtual machines. A backup strategy designed around volumes will be inefficient and make restoring data more complex. You need a backup strategy to make backing up and restoring individual virtual machines straightforward.
The New Requirements for Backup
Hyperconvergence and web scale computing mean you need to be able to backup thousands of virtual machines with minimal manual intervention. You should be able to build your backup strategy top-down, focusing on the VMs and application, rather than bottom-up, focusing on hardware devices. While hyperconverged storage requires replication, backups should use deduplication and other strategies to minimize the amount of backup storage needed The backups should support doing restores at all levels, including virtual machine, application, file, and volume. It needs to be easy to move backups between primary and secondary environments, including the cloud.
Integrated Backups
The easiest way to achieve those backup requirements is to look for a hyperconverged solution that has integrated backups into its design, rather than treating it as an add on. Nutanix includes an integrated backup solution to create snapshots and replicate them to backup storage or the cloud.
Nutanix also provides support for the VMware vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP), allowing you to use your choice of backup software. Plugins to backup software like Veritas NetBackup allow you create and manage sophisticated backup strategies. With Veritas NetBackup and Nutanix, you can achieve high performance and scalability; after the initial backup, future incremental backups have almost no impact on compute nodes.
Simplify Your Backup Management
dcVAST offers managed backup services that help ensure your data is backed up securely and can be recovered easily. We also provide managed Nutanix services, helping you deploy and manage your hyperconverged infrastructure. Combined with our Veritas expertise—we’re a Veritas Technical Support Partner—our insights can help you shift to the new, more effective, more efficient backup strategy required by virtual machine-based data centers. Contact us to learn more how our services can help you modernize and simplify your backup processes.
Additional Hyperconvergence Resources:
Two Ways of Looking at Hyperconvergence and Data Protection
Hyperconverged Infrastructure Supports High Availability and Data Protection
Are You Falling for These Hyperconverged Infrastructure Myths?
