Virtualized Data Needs Protection, Too
May 9, 2007

One of the most exciting trends in IT over the past year has been the adaptation of virtualization from test and development environments to actual production systems.

As Jimmy Pike, Dell’s director of systems architecture says in our just-posted webcast, “Virtualization is on the brink of a paradigm shift, which will fundamentally change IT as we know it over the next couple of years.”

Pike points out that, while enterprises will continue to look to virtualization for server consolidation, they are now also using it to achieve high availability, disaster recovery and business continuity.

But mainstreaming virtualization into production systems presents new challenges as well as opportunities.  Protecting data on virtual machines (VM) is similar—but in important ways different—from protecting data on physical servers.

The bottom line is to follow the mantra of our webcast experts: protect virtualized data just as robustly as you would data on physical servers.  You also need to protect the service console and virtual disk files (called VMDKs if you’re using VMware) to enable rapid recovery of the virtual machine.  With thorough data protection for your virtualized environments, you’ll be able to recover even more quickly than you could have from a physical environment.

With all the benefits of virtualization, taking some prudent steps to protect data is a small price to pay.  Moving to virtualization means being as cognizant, if not more so, about data protection than in the past. Hopefully, it’s something that you’ve been doing all along.

For more information, check out our webcast, Data Protection for Virtualization.

Previous Blog Posts
11.07.07 - Scaling Out Strategically
08.28.07 - How to Cut Costs and Save the World
07.17.07 - Planting the Seeds for Datacenter Greenery
06.26.07 - Scale Out Zen — Do More with Less
06.14.07 - iSCSI...About to Go Mainstream?
05.30.07 - Is Your Data Center in a State of Quiet Desperation?
05.17.07 - EPA Data Center Guidelines: IT Power Use Is in the Spotlight
05.09.07 - Virtualized Data Needs Protection, Too
04.19.07 - Disaster Recovery on the Back Burner? Careful, It May Catch on Fire
04.10.07 - Professional Help for the Data Center
03.27.07 - Survey Shows Virtualization Taking Off
03.14.07 - Tackling Data Protection Alphabet Soup
03.07.07 - The Cost of Not Protecting Data
02.28.07 - Going Green to Conserve Energy in the Data Center
01.30.07 - Global Warming in the Data Center
12.02.06 - Open Standards Is for Systems Management Too
11.22.06 - Virtually Ready for Primetime
11.14.06 - Technology No Substitute for Communication
10.16.06 - Running a Data Center? What's Your Problem?