eBook

2012

Essential Checklist for Backup and Recovery

by Greg Shields, MS MVP & VMware vExpert

Greg Shields
MS MPV & VMware vExpert
Greg Shields is a Senior Partner with Concentrated T echnology. With fifteen years of IT experience, Greg is one of the worlds leading experts on virtualization, cloud, and systems management technologies. He is a Contributing Editor and columnist for Microsoft T echNet Magazine and Redmond Magazine, has written over fourteen books, and contributes regularly to online publications like T echT arget and MCPMag.com. He is also a highly sought-after and top-ranked speaker for both live and recorded events, and is seen regularly at conferences like T echMentor, the Microsoft Management Summit, Microsoft T ech Ed, VMworld, Connections, among others. Greg is a multiple-year recipient of Microsofts Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award and VMwares vExpert award.

Its 2012, more than a decade into the 21st century. Yet many of us are still using 1970s-era backup and recovery technologies, accepting decades-old limitations and objectives. Its time to modernize, so heres a checklist of things your backup and recovery approach needs to include:

Backup & Recovery CHECKLIST Near-instant recovery of virtual and physical servers. The ability to return to operations in minutes in the event of a failure. Having almost zero data at-risk at any given time. Automated verification and testing for recoverability . Backup and data replication on a single pane of glass. Recovery virtual and physical machines in a single pane of glass, with a single solution. Push-button failover using virtual machines. Push-button disaster recovery testing. Bare-metal server recovery to similar or dissimilar hardware, or to virtual machines on any hypervisor . Mountable backup snapshots to access SQL Server databases, Exchange mailbox stores, and other data.

If your backup and recovery solution can provide you with these ten key capabilities, congratulations! Youve enabled a level of protection and recoverability for your organization that few have achieved. If, however, youre not delivering these ten key capabilities to your business, then you have room for improvement. Lets look at each of these in greater depth.

Key Capability #1: Near-Instant Virtual and Physical Recovery

The real business goal of any backup and recovery solution is, of course, to get back to work as fast as possible. Spinning through magnetic backup tapes certainly isnt very fast and you can do a lot better. A modern backup system can leverage todays powerful virtualization technologies, no matter which hypervisor or hypervisors your organization has adopted. Live replication of backed-up data from one VM to another ensures you have a virtual hot spare for critical servers. In the event of a failure, simply power on the hot spare, and youre back in operation. A truly excellent backup solution lets you do the same thing for physical servers. Continually back up the server, replicate its data to a hot spare VM, and youll be able to simply boot that hot spare in the event of a problem. Instant is pretty much as fast as possible.

Key Capability #2: RTO Measured in Minutes

A critical metric in any backup and recovery plan is the Recovery Time Objective, or RTO. In other words, how quickly can you get a failed system back online? With the live recovery techniques outlined in the previous section, your RTO can literally be minutes. Whether youre simply starting up a hot-spare virtual machine or pushing prioritized data to a server, your users are up and running almost before theyve realized there was a problem.

Key Capability #3: Near-Zero RPO

Another critical backup and recovery metric is the Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. This metric defines the amount of data youre willing to have at-risk between backups. Most organizations settle for an RPO of an entire day, relying on evening maintenance windows to take full, incremental, and differential backups. Why settle? Why not use continuous backup technologies that capture individual changes to disk blocks as theyre happening, sending those changes to a centralized backup server almost instantly? When youre getting every change at every moment of the day, the maintenance window expands to cover the entire day. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. Theres no data at risk, ever.

Key Capability #4: Automated Verification and Recovery Testing

Most administrators know that magnetic tapes are not 100% reliable. Theyve gotten better over the years, but having a bad tape rear its head in the middle of a recovery is still a common occurrence. Its also every admins nightmare. Even disk-to-disk backups arent necessarily perfect. Network hiccups, bad disk blocks, and a host of other problems mean that youre still not 100% guaranteed to have a clean, usable backup when you need one. Unless, of course, you have a backup solution that acknowledges this risk and works automatically to remove it. Its all about automation: Backups that occur continuously, throughout the day, without you having to think about it. Automatic verification of those backups, down to the disk block level, ensure that every captured bit of data is an exact replica of the original, and that your backups are 100% reliable, all the time.

Key Capability #5: Backups, Plus Replication

We dont always think about backups as a form of replication, but thats what they really are, right? Were creating a replica of our critical data, so that we can rely on that replica in the event of a failure. But replication can do so much more especially when youre capturing a continuous stream of changes to blocks on disk. Replication can keep a hot spare virtual machine continuously up-to-date, ready to start up and take over in the event of a server failure. Well-designed replication can even work across WAN links, keeping an off-site copy of your data automatically, or keeping a cloud-based hot spare ready to run. Doesnt sound like a traditional backup, but its far more effective than having someone take your magnetic tapes off-site every morning. So if backup and replication are really just two different names for the same business goal, why not manage them from a single, unified management system? Some of your systems youll just want to back up, so that you can recover the system or retrieve data. Other systems youll want to replicate, for instant recovery via a virtual hot spare. Consolidate both into a single pane of glass, and manage your entire recovery plan from a single spot. After all, its about the recovery, not the actual backup, right?

Key Capability #6: Virtual. Physical. Doesnt Matter.

Your organization is probably running some servers on physical boxes, while the rest run as virtual machines. A few of you have achieved 100% virtual. Whatever your virtual-physical split, your recovery solutions should handle both and it should treat them both the same. Doing so mean minimizing the dependencies on hypervisor-specific APIs, so that your backup solution can work with whatever hypervisors you use today and whatever youll use in the future. Why maintain separate solutions? One for physical machines, one for Hyper-V machines, one for XenServer VMs, and one for VMware? Thats ridiculous theyre all just servers, after all! Get them all into a single pane of glass and manage everything from a single view. The world is moving ever further into a heterogeneous approach for hosting IT workloads. If youre a fan of the private cloud idea, then you already understand how important it is to manage services, not physical boxes or virtual machines. With the right recovery solution, you can do exactly that: Ensure that your services are being properly backed up, and recover them as needed, without worrying about which ones are running on physical boxes and which ones are virtualized.

Key Capability #7: Affordable, One-Click Disaster Recovery

Want complete, cost-effective disaster recovery? No problem: Simply instruct your backup solution to keep hotspare virtual machines in another location that are ready to power on and take over with the push of a button. No waiting for data to restore, because the data is already restored just power on the VM and youre back in business. Virtualization lets you do this without the incredible expense once associated with hot spares: Because youre not buying pallets full of spare boxes, you can keep a hot spare for as many servers as you want. If a server whether virtual or physical fails, just boot up its clone and put your users back to work. You even avoid the mess and expense of duplicate software licenses. Because your hot spares arent running all of the time, you usually wont need to separately license the software theyre running. They only run and need their software licensing when the original server fails, at which point it doesnt need the license anymore!

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Key Capability #8: Disaster Recovery You Can Actually Test

Nobody enjoys disaster recovery testing. You know the drill: Half the IT team heads to the backup datacenter, hoping silently that the DR test wont create an actual disaster. Instead, just click a couple of buttons in your recovery console. Instantly, virtual machines spring to life in a protected area off the production network. Siloed there, youre enabled to perform a complete disaster recovery test anytime you like, without a single impact on production systems. Whether those recovery virtual machines live in your local datacenter, in a different site, or somewhere in the cloud, youre able to schedule frequent, successful disaster recovery tests. And the good news is that a real disaster recovery operation would look identical to that process: Just click a few buttons, spin up virtual machines, and the critical pieces of your datacenter are back up and running.

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Key Capability #9: Bare-Metal Recovery to Anywhere and Anything

A good recovery solution doesnt box you in. Need to restore a physical machines up-to-the-minute backup to a spare box on completely different hardware? Shouldnt be a problem. Want to push that backup to a virtual machine? Go right ahead. Need to restore a busy virtual machine back to a physical box? That should be easy, too. With the right recovery solution, P2V , P2P , V2P , and V2V all look and work the same. Dissimilar hardware, different hypervisors, doesnt matter: Y ou recover what you need, when you need it, to wherever you need it at that exact moment.

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Key Capability #10: Get to Your Data Without Restoring it

Youre well aware that most recovery time is spent recovering individual bits of data, not entire servers. Deleted files, lost e-mail messages, damaged database tables, the old way of recovering data required restoring an entire system just to get at one piece of data. No more. A modern recovery solution lets you mount the entire backup image as a snapshot to any point in time you like and access the data within it as if it was a running server. Grab files, SQL Server data, mail messages, and more, all directly from the backup, without the need for any extra disk space and without the need to restore the entire backed-up server system. Its all about making your backups work for you, instead of the other way around.

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Can Your Recovery Solution Deliver?

Does your recovery solution deliver all ten of these key capabilities? Can you get your business back online in minutes, using whatever combination of physical and virtual resources you have? Are you risking almost zero data by continuously capturing changes at all times? If not, consider an upgrade to your backup and recovery approach. That upgrade can be a modern recovery solution embraces a thoroughly up-to-date approach that lets you truly leverage your physical, virtual, and cloudbased resources for maximum recoverability in a minimum amount of time.

AppAssure Software
AppAssure is a Dell company that provides complete server, application and data protection. Its unified and integrated backup and replication software is engineered on innovative and groundbreaking technologies that offer near-zero recovery time, 100% recoverability assurance, and crossplatform virtual and physical server recovery (P2V , V2V , V2P or P2P). Building on a history of innovation and multiple industry firsts, AppAssure continues to set the standard in virtual and physical server data protection.

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