Data Backup Digest

A recent study conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group found that only 8% of businesses have virtualized the majority of their servers that could be. A similar study from Techaisle found that, in 2014, only 60% of servers were virtualized. That number is expected to rise, but if the goal is to reach full virtualization then it isn’t in sight.

The latter study noted that virtualization does have a lot of challenging factors, which can explain why its uptake isn’t huge, like large costs and complexity in management.

It’s quite likely that your organisation makes use of a hybrid server environment, which will be made up of physical and virtual servers. The data that a business stores is extremely important that is vital to the daily operation. If any of these servers were to suffer data loss or an outage, whether that’s the physical or virtual server, then it can have huge repercussions: financial loss, customer dissatisfaction, failure of compliance tests and much more.

To look after your data, it’s essential that you protect your entire environment. This means servers both physical and virtual. If you were to protect different server types in different ways then that’s a recipe for disaster – you need to ensure that all of your data is protected equally, no matter where it is stored.

Also, using a hybrid environment allows you reap benefits such as aggregated notifications, unified polices and reporting standards.

Think about all the different server environments that are available. It could be a physical Windows or Linux one, virtual VMware, Xen, Hyper-V, or anything else. Wherever data is stored it needs to be protected equally. As such, you should be able to restore after any downtime with speed. Even if you’re not restoring to the exact same environment, you need to minimise any downtime and certainly have no data loss.

CIO reported on a non-profit business in the Washington area that had their entire IT infrastructure damaged after a pipe above the server room burst. More than 360 of their virtual machines were wiped out before their team could do anything about it.

Because of limited resources, many businesses need to use a combination of virtual and physical servers to benefit from efficiency through server provisioning speed increases and increased uptime. A survey performed by Acronis and IDC found that 61 percent of small businesses use virtualization, while around half of them use a combination of physical and virtual.

The thing is, backing up and managing the data on a virtual server is an entirely different kettle of fish compared to a physical server. These environments operate on different technologies and businesses often use different backup solutions for them – this is unsuitable. The backup solution needs to be unified.

By using a suite that brings together tools and technologies across the virtual and physical data space means that data can be viewed across the board. This means that there’s complete protection, decreased downtime and a much better view on recovery.

Whatever your environment, you need your data to be backed up. Whether it’s a single server type or a hybrid, use the same solution that can capture all your data in a unified view.