Many IT professionals hesitate to rely on snapshot technology to recover virtual machines. Instead, they continue to depend on traditional backup solutions despite their limitations. The reality is that most backup systems can't capture data frequently enough, leaving gaps in protection, and they take far too long to execute a full recovery. While snapshots offer a faster, more efficient solution, concerns about performance degradation, limited retention, and reliability have caused many to steer clear.

To meet the demands of modern virtualization, snapshots must evolve to deliver real-time protection and recovery without the pitfalls of legacy methods. Here's what is required to make snapshots a viable alternative to traditional backups for your virtual infrastructure.

Independent Snapshots

A key issue is the traditional approach of linking snapshots together, creating dependency chains where a failure in one snapshot could corrupt an entire series. For snapshots to become a viable recovery option, they must operate independently. This ensures that each snapshot can be used to restore a VM without relying on previous snapshots or the primary volume, reducing the risk of failure and providing a more reliable recovery method.

High Performance Under Load

Many IT teams worry that taking frequent snapshots will impact the performance of their virtualized environments, especially under heavy workloads. A modern snapshot solution must be designed to handle high I/O demands without bottlenecking the system. To be a reliable part of the data protection strategy, the snapshot process must scale with the system and maintain optimal performance, regardless of the storage technology-whether flash or traditional hard drives.

Efficient Storage Management

A common complaint is that snapshots consume too much storage too quickly, making them unsustainable for long-term use. Without efficient storage management, the snapshot process can overwhelm storage resources. A viable solution must include advanced deduplication techniques, ensuring that each snapshot only saves incremental changes while minimizing storage consumption. This allows for frequent snapshots without rapidly exhausting storage capacity.

Fast and Granular Recovery

Backup solutions are often slow, especially when recovering entire VMs or complete workloads. Snapshots must provide faster recovery options to be considered viable. IT teams need the ability to quickly restore entire environments or granular components, like individual files or folders, directly from a snapshot. This flexibility allows for both comprehensive disaster recovery and minor, day-to-day corrections, ensuring minimal downtime.

Long-Term Retention Without Performance Degradation

Another challenge is ensuring that snapshots can be retained for extended periods without degrading system performance. Some environments require snapshots to be kept for months or even years, particularly for regulatory compliance. A viable snapshot system must ensure that performance remains stable even as snapshots accumulate, using efficient data management practices like deduplication to minimize the performance impact of long-term storage.

Ransomware and Malware Protection

With ransomware a constant threat, IT teams are understandably concerned about snapshots' vulnerability to malware attacks. A viable solution must ensure that snapshots remain read-only, preventing any unauthorized changes or deletions by ransomware. Snapshots should act as an untouchable archive of your data, providing an easy path to recovery if your primary environment is compromised. Frequent snapshots with isolated access points can also help mitigate the blast radius of an attack.

Ease of Use and Automation

One reason IT teams avoid relying on snapshots is the complexity of manually managing them in large environments. Snapshots should be easy to automate, allowing for scheduled creations, retention policies, and regular deletions. A streamlined user interface and automation capabilities reduce human error and make snapshots a more practical option for busy IT teams.

Conclusion

Despite the skepticism around snapshots, a few modern solutions have addressed the performance and scalability issues that make legacy solutions unreliable. The right snapshot technology can provide real-time protection, instant recovery, and efficient storage management. While backups still have their place, snapshots should now be crucial to any virtualization data protection strategy.

Platforms like VergeIO integrate advanced snapshot technology to ensure that IT teams have a fast, reliable recovery option that minimizes downtime and maximizes data availability. IT teams can rethink their approach and consider snapshots a viable solution for virtualization recovery. VergeIO discusses how their snapshot methodology makes them the first choice for the recovery of VMs in their latest blog "Using Snapshots to Protect VMs". You can also register for their demonstration-only webinar "Protecting VergeOS.