Tek Tips Whitepaper Library » Virtualization

Beyond Simple Data Backups - Real Business Continuity

Lanlogic — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:17:09 +0000

We all know how important it is to develop a Disaster Recovery/Business Conntinuity Plan. If you still don’t have one, consider this : relying on backup data that you have never tested and have no idea how long it would take to restore … is not a plan.

In the old days of IT, backing up one whole server or all your servers was cost-prohibitive and time-consuming. While most folks put an emphasis on backups for their server-based data today, we wanted to provide you with an education about the true realities of depending on data backups alone:

What happens if you need to recover after a server crash ? Do you have all the backup data accessible and cataloged accurately, or do you have a collection of tapes and disks “hoping” that it’s all there ? Assuming you know where your data is and how it is organized, you’ll still need a lot more. Do you have all the operating system disks and application software disks that came with the server originally or was updated since then ? Assuming you do, you’ll still need a lot more. Do you have a new server to install everything onto, or will you be able to wait the required time for delivery from your favorite vendor ? If your server is out of warranty and you have to buy a new one, expect to wait several days, possibly longer. Assuming you have all your backup data organized perfectly, all your original installation disks, and an entire extra server handy … you can begin the process of restoring your business to normal functionality. If you don’t have all the aforementioned steps in place ahead of time (very few companies do), then you’ll need to waste more time collecting everything (if you can find it all).

	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		Real Time Protection for Hyper-V
	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Recovery Process – like rebuilding a house.

A company’s data is stored on a server to enable easy sharing for all appropriate users. Lose the server for a couple of hours and watch your staff productivity drop like a rock. Lose the server for a couple of days and you might as well tell your customers to come back when you call them. Scary ? Of course ! Recovering from a server crash is very painful. It takes a lot of time, you find yourself paying whatever it takes to get back in business as quickly as possible, and you never want to go through it again. Having gone through this experience with lots of clients since 1995, we have seen it all. Lost tapes, corrupted drives, misplaced disks, expired warranties, overtime charges for nights and weekends, everything. There is a better way.

Imagine if you had the ability to run out of the house with every single piece of property you owned, in the event of a natural disaster. I mean everything, including the wall coverings and toothpaste. But you had to throw it all into boxes which went into multiple moving vans which got driven to different storage locations. That’s what your backup data looks like for your server, when you really do have it all on different tapes and drives. The tricky part is setting it all back up correctly, in the right order, with the most important items first. And then remember, that unless you could make an exact clone of your house with all its belongings as they were at the time of the disaster, you would never get everything you needed, and you would certainly never be able to know where anything was.

So, if you’re still interested in continuing to depend on the arduous process of recovering from a server crash the old way, by spending untold amounts of time and money and hoping you can find all your information on the numerous tapes and disks in your office or home, then we wish you the best of luck. We’ll be here to help when you call, but it won’t be pretty.

Instead, if you’d like to think of preparing for something like this in a better way, consider exploring a real Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solution.

Business Continuity – what you really need

Imagine being able to actually “clone” your house with all its property inside and be able to set it all up temporarily at another safe location, within a few hours of any natural disaster. While that may be far-fetched for your house, it’s now possible for your server ! Using imaging technology, disk based storage, and a virtualization platform designed for enterprise environments, you can have this “clone” of your entire server infrastructure … on-demand. It works in the background, it confirms daily operation through a system of alerts, and it stores a copy of all your data offsite, far away from your office in case a natural disaster actually occurs. The Lanlogic Virtual Server Backup solution offers all this and more. Using newly introduced technologies now available for small businesses, Lanlogic can give you the peace of mind that comes with knowing that your entire server infrastructure can be “turned on” anywhere/anytime in the event of a server crash or natural disaster. Contact us to learn more about this new solution today.

More Energy Efficiency by IT at Data Centers, Panel Disucssion Proposal

Zen Kishimoto — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:42:46 +0000

I wrote about my first idea for a panel discussion in my previous blog, and here’s my second. When we analyze the power consumption ratio among servers, storage equipment, and networking, we find that servers consume far more power than storage and networking equipment combined. That is why the initial Energy Star effort at energy efficiency in data centers was for servers. EPA’s first version of the server energy efficiency rating system is completed, and the agency is working on the second version now.

Servers

There are several ways to curb server power consumption in data centers:

Turn off unused or unnecessary servers.
Consolidate servers via virtualization.
Implement power management.
Refresh hardware for better energy efficiency.

The second and fourth options above have been given a lot of attention. Is there anything more we could do to reduce consumption?

Storage

After we got a handle on server energy efficiency, we started looking at storage devices, which consume a sizable amount of power, even though it’s less than servers use. This is reflected by EPA’s recent effort to establish an Energy Star rating system for storage. There are a few energy efficiency technologies for storage devices:

deduplication
MAID
thin provisioning

Anything else?

Networking (revised and added)

We have not seen any effort on a rating system for networking energy efficiency yet by EPA. But IEEE has started working on one. Some of the energy efficiency in this space are:

IEEE EEE (Energy Efficient Ethernet): This is a specification for a more-efficient Ethernet.
WOL (Wake on LAN): A network message turns a computer on when it’s needed and off when it isn’t.
Network I/O Virtualization with Unified Fabric: Fibre Channel can be carried on top of Ethernet.
Network Controller I/O Offload: Offloads networking tasks from central CPUs to offloading engines.

When we analyze power consumption at data centers, depending upon the data we quote, we find that cooling consumes 30% to 60% of the power. So we tend to curb the power consumed by cooling. But when we step back and think hard, we realize that the IT equipment is generating intense heat. There is a study that indicates that a 1 W IT saving equates to a 2.84 W facilities saving.

	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		Ten Cooling Solutions to Support High-Density Server Deployment
	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

So another idea for a panel is to gather people who are in the server, storage, and networking space and discuss how the IT space can be made more energy efficient. One panelist could be a vendor or someone who installs data center equipment. Another panelist could be a designer or planner of IT infrastructure who might be able to quantify the saving. If the quantification is hard for the planner, we could bring in a researcher.

I might ask the panelists:

Can you run your equipment under much higher temperature? If so, how high can it be?
Is there any other way to curb (server, storage, or networking) power consumption further, independent of the facilities environment?
Can you save more if you coordinate your server with storage or networking equipment?
How can you curb power consumption if you coordinate your IT equipment with the facilities environment?
How about DC interfaces to your IT equipment to support DC power distribution?

What is your idea?

Nebula Cloud Project-in-a-Box by NASA Ames

Zen Kishimoto — Fri, 07 May 2010 16:06:47 +0000

I am always on the watch for interesting stories about green IT, cloud computing, and smart grid. When someone pitched me a story about the container-based data center (CDC), I did not pay much attention because, at the time, CDC was dismissed as only for large companies like Microsoft and Google. But when I heard from multiple sources that CDC was rebounding, my antennae went up and I started asking data center experts about it. I’ve written about it before. The majority of people were negative on CDC’s imminent resurgence, dismissing its general applicability.

Two people had different opinions. One was Mark Thiele, who was director at VMware, but who is now involved in so much that I am not sure how to describe him. He told me that it might take a few years, but the surge of cloud computing would make CDC a practical solution. I was still a bit skeptical about it. I then talked to Alex Fielding of Power Assure, who showed me his research on CDC. He introduced me a few months ago to a person involved in NASA’s Nebula project. Between that person’s busy schedule and my trips, I did not succeed until recently in making an appointment with him.

I finally had a chance to visit NASA Ames, where long ago, I tried to take its research prototype to the commercial market. From 2000 to 2002, I was on the Ames campus (not in the secure area) with my partner. With a contractor badge, I could enter the secure zone as well. It was nice to be able to step back onto the campus. For those who do not know the security arrangement there, you need a sponsor (a NASA Ames employee) to enter the secure zone. Since it was early, I drove around the building where we used to have an office.

This is a picnic area just behind our building where my partner and I discussed how to deal with NASA

In any event, I met this person, who did not want to be identified or quoted but was willing to show me the Nebula box. Here’s a picture of it, which has been published many times and in many places in the past.

Nebula container

Since I promised not to identify or quote him, I am simply writing my comments here. By now it is not new to see a CDC. The container is a standard 40 feet, but the differences are in the contents. As Dean Nelson of Data Center Pulse told me, a CDC is just a big rack, and there are many ways you can design the inside. The servers can be mounted front-to-back or sideways. Cooling can come from the ceiling or from the floor. (Even though cooling was working inside the container, outside it was very windy and cold. Airside economizer could be kicked in, although I do not know if it had such a feature.) Unless you know these things, you cannot evaluate a CDC well.

We were standing outside the building where the Nebula box was placed. Around the building, there was a lot of space. Since it is a container, it can be lifted easily and placed on a truck for transportation. When you need more computing power, you can add containers with relative ease. When you no longer need a CDC, the container can be removed and taken to where computing power is required. So, in a sense, a CDC is greener than a data center housed in a real building.

The Nebula project’s objective is to provide a cloud computing environment for NASA and beyond.

	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		More Functionality, Less Infrastructure: Managed IT with Double-Take Flex
	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I poked around the Nebula website and found out many things. Some time ago, the U.S. government’s new CIO said something about cloud computing being superior to data centers. Several people criticized him for not being technically savvy, since cloud computing is housed in data centers. After reading several pages on the website, I think I now know what he really meant. Before, when one branch of the federal government needed to extend its computing power supply, it would build a new data center without sharing with other branches. A data center is expensive to build and maintain. It could run several hundred millions of dollars to construct and run. With the advent of cloud computing, branches can share computing power.

Also very strange was the website’s emphasis on speed-to-implement. When we dealt with NASA eight years ago, we could not find "speed” and "NASA” in the same sentence. Obviously, a change in management did the trick. A small box alone could provide a large amount of computing power to NASA Ames and beyond. It is good to know our taxes are at work without being wasted.

X2X Server and Storage Migration Solutions

Double-Take Software — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:37:27 +0000

Migrating applications, systems and data is a monumental challenge for IT staff. Double-Take Move allows you to dramatically reduce the impact of migration tasks on your users and IT staff. Download whitepaper Related posts:Ten Cooling Solutions to Support High-Density Server DeploymentWhat Is Open Storage?: The Need for a New Storage ArchitectureMigration to the 2007 Microsoft Office System: [...] Related posts:

Disaster Recovery Planning with Virtualization

Double-Take Software — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:13:01 +0000

This whitepaper discusses the challenges of protecting virtualized workloads. Double-Take Software virtualization solutions can work in any environment, on any platform, and across any distance to affordably protect your critical data and applications. Download whitepaper Related posts:More Functionality, Less Infrastructure: Managed IT with Double-Take FlexReal Time Protection for Hyper-VDisaster Recovery Intro eGuide Related posts:

Real Time Protection for Hyper-V

Double-Take Software — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 21:52:47 +0000

To provide disaster recovery for virtual machines running on a Hyper-V host, look to Double-Take for Hyper-V from Double-Take Software to protect your workloads with real-time replication and automated failover for virtualized workloads. Double-Take for Hyper-V allows customers to quickly recover virtual machines after any type of outage without the expense and complexity of clustering or shared storage.

Download whitepaper

More Functionality, Less Infrastructure: Managed IT with Double-Take Flex

Double-Take Software — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 21:32:26 +0000

This whitepaper discusses the challenges of protecting virtualized workloads. Double-Take Software virtualization solutions can work in any environment, on any platform, and across any distance to affordably protect your critical data and applications. Download whitepaper Related posts:Disaster Recovery Planning with VirtualizationReal Time Protection for Hyper-VReducing Costs with Open Network Systems for Internet Infrastructure Related posts:

Reducing Costs with Open Network Systems for Internet Infrastructure

Sun Microsystems — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:45:40 +0000

In this white paper, the experts at IDC examine why server-related costs like power, cooling, configuration, and management have grown all out of proportion to the size of the data center—which itself has grown by leaps and bounds! Their suggested solution: blade servers deployed within a virtualized infrastructure, to drastically cut operational costs while eliminating service bottlenecks. Learn how to do more with less—download your copy now.

Download white paper

Guide to Cost-Effectively Refreshing Aging Servers

Sun Microsystems — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:04:10 +0000

A significant number of the servers shipped this year will replace existing ones, according to this white paper from the experts at IDC. More capable servers can bring down energy and real estate costs, while cutting operating expenses and supporting new server-intensive Web apps. Now learn the most cost-effective strategy for refreshing your servers—and when it makes more sense to refresh than to upgrade.

Download white paper

What Is Open Storage?: The Need for a New Storage Architecture

Sun Microsystems — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:53:59 +0000

This free white paper reveals how the latest generation of open storage systems is helping businesses stay flexible and profitable. Learn how Web 2.0’s massive storage requirements are pushing businesses toward storage that’s affordable, reliable, and dynamic; how open source code gives you faster innovation, wider choice, and lower costs without vendor lock-in; and how 6 organizations around the world are successfully deploying it. Download your free copy now.

Download whitepaper