Top 3 tips for virtual infrastructure protection

Flexible infrastructure

If you already have a disaster recovery solution in place make sure that it is flexible enough to be used for physical and virtual server platforms. Also, make sure that you aren’t vendor locked into something that is hardware- specific and can only talk to other devices like itself.

Data center managers maintain a variety of hardware and require workload flexibility to maintain solutions for every environment. Find a solution that is hardware agnostic and will fit existing design infrastructure.

Offsite storage

Most companies already have a co-location facility in place or, at the very least, a satellite office that can be used to receive data offsite for disaster recovery. Whether it is a duplicate virtual infrastructure in the same data center, across the street or another country, having an up-to-date virtual workload backup provides the option for recovery when needed.

WAN infrastructure

How the data is transmitted will be important when protecting your virtual infrastructure. Some synchronous hardware solutions are block-based replication and require more bandwidth and can have distance limitations.

Some of the virtual products on the market use a snapshot-based technology that sends data in periodic chunks (verses only changes made to specific files) and can also saturate existing bandwidth during the transfer process. WAN accelerators from companies such as Riverbed and Silver Peak can improve bandwidth limitations.

For more information, read What you need to know about backing up virtual machines.

Author: Ian Masters, Double-Take Software.