
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Jarrett Potts, director of strategic marketing for STORServer
2014 predictions for data protection of virtual ones and zeros
Virtual systems protected in the cloud
As 2013 winds down, we are
seeing a greater adaption of virtual technology that enables data and
applications to be more mobile and flexible. Your mail server is no longer
directly tied to a vendor's hardware, and instead, can be moved from machine to
machine with little to no downtime. This allows users to keep data in the
fastest and safest way possible.
Recent advancements allow
data to now be replicated and managed in a cloud. In 2014, you will start to
see a shift towards virtual data protection, or the ability to replicate
virtual hosts to a service provider. This provides many new features that will
start to become more mainstream, such as:
-
Backup to the cloud
-
Decommissioning to the cloud
-
Disaster recovery to the cloud
Virtual mobility and flexibility
With advances in
replication and cloud, you will begin to see how your virtual environments have
become more mobile. You will see companies that have data in virtual
environments that are available in many places at any given time.
A great example of this is
a production environment that is protected with your data protection solution
and could be copied and brought up under a new hostname for training purposes
on a weekly basis. This test machine could be brought up in any environment at
any time and location.
Virtual machine management
Virtual machines are transient
by their very nature. Some are up only for hours or days while others are up
for long periods of time. This presents a real problem for system administrators.
How do they manage hosts in an environment where it takes only a few minutes to
bring up a new server and to bring it down? How does a system administrator
keep up with all the changes and decide what data to protect and what data is
trash?
In 2014, you will see
further integration of host management into data protection solutions. For
example, when a server is decommissioned today, the host is shut off but the
image of the host still resides on physical disk somewhere in the environment. If
you are not going to restart the host, at some point, it needs to be removed
from the environment's disk and archived off to some non-production media, such
as tape.
You will see
virtual software start including in the "hooks" from the API to
better manage their hosts for long periods of time, and thus, allow data
protection vendors enhanced access to the policies that allow better long-term
management and protection. A good example of this would be the decommissioning
of hosts automatically. When a host is not used for a pre-determined amount
of time, VMWare or the like will automatically archive
and delete them from the ESX server.
Tape will not die
Finally, in 2014, you will
not see tape die. The people who say tape is dead are the same people who told
us UNIX was dead. Tape is way too portable and inexpensive to die. It will
continue to grow in size and cost less per megabyte and terabyte.
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About the Author
Jarrett Potts, director
of strategic marketing for STORServer, a leading provider of
proven data backup solutions for the mid-market. Before joining the STORServer
team, Potts spent the past 15 years working in various capacities for IBM,
including Tivoli Storage Manager marketing and technical sales. He has been the
evangelist for the TSM family of products since 2000. His breadth of experience
includes administering IT systems, including desktop support, small networks,
backbone infrastructure, storage management and remote access for corporations and ISPs.