Data Backup Digest

Using virtualisation on servers and desktops is beneficial for many reasons, not least the reduced costs associated with it. While it’s true that virtualisation brings about many positives, it’s true to say that it can make backup processes a bit more difficult. Virtual machines all share out their resources, while a physical server only plays host to one application. Additionally, virtual machines can be moved around with such ease that it becomes paramount to have a strong method of tracking it all.

Turkey has seen the number of firms using virtualisation for their servers grow greatly over the past decade. Although some enterprises had worries over adoption rates, the technical and financial benefits offered have won out. IDC have reported that the virtualisation rate in Turkey was 36.8% in 2013. This market is currently owned by Microsoft and VMware, having a respective market share of 47% and 45%.

Computer Weekly did a case study on the use of virtual machines in Turkey and looked at Eczacıbaşı. This is one of the biggest industrial groups in the country, made up of 41 companies across sectors like healthcare, building and consumer products.

The firm have taken to using virtualisation across all their companies. Baris Furtinalar is the cloud services team leader of the group.

“Of the many advantages virtualisation offers, the most important aspect for us has been the huge cost benefit it yielded,” he said. “Although the project is still in progress, we have already reached the point we aimed at in terms of server consolidation and energy consumption.”

Using virtualisation has allowed the firm to able to recover the whole machine or just a specific file. Before this they relied on standard file-level methods, but they’ve now changed to back up at the host level. Across the business they have more than 500 virtual servers on VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V.

They use CommVault Simpana as backup software, plus Veeam and VMware and Hyper-V replication. However, they plan to move away from these systems eventually.

“That’s because Veeam is designed for virtual environments, whereas Simpana is a more generalised backup product. Another factor is the cost, as the volume of backup increases constantly. So we take cost as one of the priorities in selecting products and Veeam’s competitive prices stand out,” Furtinalar explained.

One company that offers datacentre services in Turkey is Anadolu Information Systems (ABH). They have handled virtualisation projects since 2005 and have more than 1000 virtual servers at current. Customers not only value their quality service, but also the energy savings, environmental impact and cost reduction that using virtualisation offers.

ABH use VMware and partly make use of Hyper-V. Their storage devices and servers are mainly from HP and EMC. HP is used because their servers are Vmware-certified and therefore easy to integrate. EMC is used because virtualisation requires a high I/O rate and flexibility, which the firm offers. The firm carry out VM backups daily and snapshots of VMs to their secondary datacentre.

Turkey isn’t the only country to make big use of virtualisation, of course – it continues to grow in popularity across the globe.