Blog Posts

Happy New Year 2009!

If you have New Year resolutions as below

• Going home after work and never get a call until next day morning
• Doing more with less resources in the datacenter
• Cutting costs and get immediate return of investment
• Making your company ahead of its competition
• Building Dynamic Datacenter with VMware virtualization

Virtualizing servers are just half the battle. The rest of the half is achieved by having a Virtualized shared storage.

By virtualizing servers you cut down costs, consolidate servers, reduce floorspace, reduce power and power requirements and increase your server efficiency and resources. After consolidating to a VM infrastructure you end up having longer backup and recovery windows, inefficient usage of space etc..

With any NetApp array in the backend, you do get many advantages like

• Production Inbuilt (Free) Deduplication for VMware Datastore saving upto 80% space
• Multiprotocol support on Unified NetApp Storage (Fibre Channel, NFS, iSCSI) for VM datastore
• Thin Provisioning
• Flexible volumes for High performance and to increase/decrease VM datastore on the fly.
• Instantaneous Backup and Restores using NetApp snapshots (SMVI integration)
• Robust Disaster recovery with integration of NetApp snapmirror with VMware Site Recovery Manager

The most significant of all is Instantaneous Backup/Restore using NetApp snapshots. The Entire VM farm can be backup full/selectively upto a datastore in few seconds using NetApp Snapshots. NetApp snapshots uses pointer based technology that does not cause any performance impact to the VMware environment. For every VMware datastore, the NetApp array can support 255 copies of instantaneous backups with just 20% overhead in space.

The NetApp Snapshot Backup/Restore technology integration with VMware is done by a product named SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure (SMVI). SMVI allows VMware administrators to schedule instantaneous backups on VMware ESX farm, define the backup policy, retention policy and alerts. SMVI is a GUI based backup suite that perfectly integrates VMware ESX backups with NetApp snapshot technology. All the backups taken using SMVI are completely consistent and are easily recoverable using SMVI GUI in matter of Minutes.

SMVI Advantages

• Data protection of VMware VI environment
• Ability to take consistent backup of virtual machines
• Ability to restore virtual machines & datastores
• Ability to schedule backups to match backup requirements
• Ability to set retention policies for backups
• Ability to Mirror the backup to remote site with SnapMirror
• Complements VMware's Site Recovery Manager
• Backup & restore of VMs via SMVI
• Site failover via SRM

With NetApp SMVI, Your New Year resolutions will Never fail.