Dell vmware virtualized Storage DR Insures Business Against Disaster and Downtime

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1 Dell vmware virtualized Storage DR Insures Business Against Disaster and Downtime Disaster recovery plans are a lot like insurance policies: you proactively put them in place so you re prepared when disaster strikes. A solid, stable disaster recovery plan, backed up by the leading edge storage and business continuity products and services, are essential elements of every organization s virtualized environment. A solid, stable storage and disaster recovery plan also makes the difference between being reactive and proactive. The former can result in across the board losses: time, productivity, manpower hours and potentially lost business measured in revenue dollars and customer satisfaction. Businesses that are proactive drive improvements in their IT department processes and end users access to corporate data, as they increase productivity, uptime and overall network efficiency. Organizations, especially small midsized businesses (SMBs) with one to 100 employees and small midsized enterprises (SMEs) with 101 to 500 workers, need to deploy disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) products, as well as services, to ensure near continuous availability and improve the management of their local and remote virtualized server and storage environments. 1

2 This is especially crucial for SMBs and SMEs since their IT resources are typically much more limited than those of large enterprises. Historically, however small and mid size businesses were unable to implement DR and BC solutions because they were too expensive. The advent of virtualization has changed the market dynamics: customers can now deploy effective DR/ BC strategies and solutions at a fraction of their prior cost. Small and mid size companies no longer need to make trade-offs and put their critical business assets at risk due to the high cost of a DR/ BC solution. Strong storage virtualization and disaster recovery also enables SMBs and SMEs to lower capital and operational expenses, realize faster returns on investment and mitigate risk in the event of disasters natural and unnatural or manmade. The right product set is crucial. SMBs, in particular, have little margin for error when choosing their hardware or virtualization solutions. Dell and VMware Virtualized Storage and DR Partnership and Benefits Market leaders Dell and VMware have partnered to deliver powerful storage and virtualization solutions that integrate with VMware s latest vsphere 4 and 4.1 products. The collaborative effort of these two industry leaders allows organizations to cost-effectively construct and deploy a virtualized storage and disaster recovery infrastructure that: p plowers capital and operational expenses and drives innovation p padapts and scales along with the business needs p penables IT departments and end users to protect, access and efficiently store data ppprotects critical data ppis easy to maintain and manage ppis based on industry standards p pintegrates and interoperates with the existing infrastructure p penables quick recovery from manmade or natural disaster outages p pallows IT departments and end users to readily access corporate data p pdrives new levels of efficiency via virtualization consolidation and management p pimproves network uptime, reliability and availability to % or better ppconsolidates and saves physical space pplowers utility costs and reduces the company s carbon footprint 2

3 The combination of Dell storage, DR virtualization and VMware vsphere 4 platforms enables businesses to proactively address their most pressing business and technology needs as they expand their existing virtualized environments and begin to research their potential transition to a simplified cloud infrastructure. VMware and Dell are long-term strategic partners that share the common goal of providing their joint and prospective customers with solutions that deliver tangible and immediate business and technical value. The VMware and Dell partnership delivers real results. The appropriate teams from both firms work synergistically to develop close integration and alignment of engineering, professional services, solution design, sales and marketing and aftermarket technical service and support. This results in well designed, integrated and tested solutions for customers of all sizes across all vertical markets. The two companies offer a full suite of products and services based on industry standards and which are fully interoperable with one another. Dell delivers a comprehensive portfolio of servers and storage designed and certified for VMware vsphere 4 to deliver end-to-end virtual infrastructures. The two companies also offer collaborative solution design, integration and testing to help ensure production readiness. Dell and VMware vsphere 4 Virtualization, Storage and DR Solutions Dell says that its 11th generation Power- Edge servers running VMware s vsphere 4 and 4.1 solutions have the potential to deliver up to 168% faster performance than previous generation servers that utilized the VMware ESX update 2.2. It s important to note that actual performance gains will vary depending on individual user configurations and environments. The Dell PowerEdge servers, storage and virtualization solutions enable users to overcome the most common performance bottlenecks in virtualized environments. That s because they feature expanded memory and I/O and utilize Intel Xeon processors to deliver exceptional virtualization performance. Dell is committed to driving complexity from enterprise computing, including the virtual infrastructure. VMware s ESX Server and vsphere 4 continue to be the leading server virtualization platforms and are recognized as the market leader, according to both Gartner Group and International Data Corp (IDC) 1. VMware s vsphere 4 uses the power of virtualization to help transform data centers into dramatically simplified cloud infrastructures. Together, Dell and VMware deliver efficient virtual infrastructure solutions 1. Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, Gartner Group RAS Core Research Note, May

4 that are fast to deploy and easy to manage, so users can: p pachieve greater levels of efficiency via hardware and application consolidation and automating management functions p pimprove IT departments control of Quality of Service (QoS) via service level automation p pconstruct a more flexible virtualized storage and DR environment that can adapt to changing business and technology requirements and scale along with the business needs Dell PowerEdge Servers running VMware vsphere 4 and 4.1 can help drive IT efficiency in the smallest environments and the largest data centers by delivering a tightly integrated solution that is easy to deploy and manage. The respective products and services are designed to optimize the infrastructure for performance, manageability, scalability and energy efficiency. To accomplish those goals Dell and VMware also offer a broad range of services and an extensive reference pool of best practices to assist IT departments in realizing their own goals the first time. Businesses can also elect to engage Dell s ProConsult Virtualization and Storage Services group to facilitate and speed deployment of their solution. All of the hardware/software products and services referenced in this whitepaper work synergistically to enable businesses and their IT departments to construct a proactive plan to protect and secure critical data; improve application reliability and enable organizations to recover quickly from man-made and natural disasters. This in turn, can lower TCO and accelerate ROI. Dell s EqualLogic PS Series iscsi storage area network (SAN) arrays data protection software for example, is fully integrated with VMware s vsphere 4 to provide a seamless backup and recovery solution. The EqualLogic PS Series iscsi SAN arrays simplify the management and deployment of consolidated storage environments. They also enable organizations to achieve five nines or percent near continuous availability and uptime. The Equal- Logic PS Series virtualizes the entire SAN; all volumes are automatically provisioned as a single, shared, scalable pool of storage that utilizes all storage resources within the SAN. As the workload demands shift or increase among virtual machines and the physical host servers, the Dell EqualLogic PS Series iscsi SAN will automatically designate resources where they re most needed without requiring any intervention on the part of the IT managers. To safeguard the entire datacenter, the Dell EqualLogic PS Series iscsi SANs incorporate PS Series Auto-Replication and VMware vcenter Site Recover Manager integration to support automated disaster recovery of virtualized data centers. Organizations can also choose from a variety of third party data protection software packages that are tested and 4

5 supported by Dell. Traditional DR recovery plans are often difficult to test, difficult to keep up to date, and depend on exact execution of complex, manual processes. In a virtualized Dell and VMware vsphere 4 environments, testing is simplified by allowing companies to execute non-disruptive tests leveraging existing resources. Hardware independence eliminates the complexity of maintaining the recovery site by eliminating failures due to hardware differences. Reliable disaster recovery solutions traditionally require duplicating the entire production infrastructure; this is time consuming, expensive and a great drain on IT resources. The Dell PowerEdge servers running VMware vsphere 4 and 4.1 enable organizations to rapidly and reliably recover their data without the need for duplicate, identical hardware. Freeing up some of the hardware resources means that customers can repurpose their existing Dell Power- Edge servers for disaster recovery rather than needing to buy duplicate servers for rapid recovery. The new, more powerful 11 th generation Dell PowerEdge Servers server consolidation also lets businesses slash the cost of both their production and DR server infrastructures. The combination of Dell and VMware vsphere 4 virtualized storage solutions can simplify the provisioning of resources, ease ongoing management issues, enhance storage utilization and increase scalability and capacity. When an organization consolidates and scales out storage within the Dell EqualLogic PS Series iscsi storage arrays and VMware vsphere 4, for instance, multiple virtualized platforms can share the same storage. This maximizes utilization and efficiency and greatly reduces management tasks. The Dell and VMware vsphere virtualized storage and DR solutions eliminate the need to perform numerous manual steps that are difficult or impossible to The majority of SMBs are far less risk tolerant because most lack the financial resources of their large enterprise counterparts. automate and prone to human error. Virtualization opens the door to disaster recovery automation by turning physical servers into a virtualized pool of networkbased storage which can increase in capacity and performance as the business needs dictate. Customers can also automate their disaster recovery process with VMware vcenter Site Recovery Manager. This is an embedded capability within vsphere 4 and 4.1 that ensures rapid and cost-effective execution of disaster recovery plans. It also allows companies to easily test their disaster recovery plans to ensure the highest levels of reliability and availability of the 5

6 entire IT infrastructure. To reiterate, Dell offers a comprehensive portfolio of services all of which are designed to accelerate virtualization adoption so organizations can achieve cost savings quickly, without sacrificing productivity. With VMware s extensive experience which has been honed from thousands of implementations worldwide, (Dell itself boasts one of the world s largest VMware deployments within Dell IT), and via their long-term partnership, Dell can assist The combination of Dell virtualized storage and DR used in conjunction with VMware vsphere 4 allows businesses to transition their environments from reactive to proactive. organizations in developing practical, tactical and strategic approach to virtualization. The Dell virtualized storage and DR solutions and services encompass people, processes and technology, with pro-active plans that are designed to get the business DR plan up and running quickly. Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often costly and complex and they can t always meet the organization s recovery objectives even after doubling hardware (and cost) for protected applications. Testing them can be a nightmare because the steps are tedious and the documentation is hard to keep up to date. Likewise, keeping two sets of hardware synchronized is an onerous task for overburdened IT departments. VMware s vsphere 4 enables organizations to recover to any machine, not just specific duplicate hardware. The result: a substantial reduction in hardware costs and ongoing maintenance and management. Once again, the savings and potential savings will vary according to the individual organization s environment. Companies that deploy the newer, more powerful Dell PowerEdge servers and VMware vsphere 4 can typically expect consolidation ratios of VMs to physical hardware in the range of 2:1 to 4:1. This can result in server cost savings that range on average from 20 percent to as much as 50 percent. Dell can offer specific guidance on the appropriate consolidation ratios of physical servers to VMs for data recovery by performing a Virtualization Readiness Assessment which suggests potential configurations for server and storage consolidation based on the individual organization s particular environment. The combination of Dell PowerEdge servers and VMware vsphere 4 and 4.1 virtualization also reduces the complexity of maintaining a backup site thanks to the shared storage virtualization. Even if the organization has not yet virtualized all of its production servers, it can still utilize 6

7 the Dell and VMware storage and disaster recovery products to designate specific servers for data recovery. This guarantees that the organization will have a fast, efficient, reliable and automated DR plan. By contrast, legacy manual disaster recovery plans require multiple, manual and complex steps to allocate recovery resources, perform bare metal recovery, recover data and validate that the systems are back online and ready for use. The combination of Dell PowerEdge servers and VMware vsphere 4 simplifies and automates these tasks. Hardware configurations, firmware data and application and operating system installation specifics all become data stored in just a few files on disk. Organizations can protect these data files using their backup or replication software feeling confident that they ve safeguarded the entire system. These files can then be recovered to any hardware without requiring changes because virtual machines are hardware-independent. Dell and VMware Virtualized Storage and DR: The Business Case Dell and VMware s full range of virtual storage and disaster recovery solutions address and solve customers most crucial business challenges: p phow to store, protect and manage rapidly growing data p poverseeing and monitoring increas- ingly virtualized data centers and applications that are required to make your organization successful. p phow to simplify management of a virtualized storage and DR environment These challenges have been made all the more daunting because the economic downturn has left organizations cashconstrained and with fewer resources. At the same time, the business needs dictate higher levels of uptime and reliability. This is particularly crucial in a virtualized storage environment. Virtualization allows companies to save money and manpower hours by consolidating resources. The most fundamental and crucial customer requirements for the virtualized storage infrastructure are high availability and the ability to quickly recover and access their stored virtualized data. Nearly three-quarters or 74 percent of all businesses say they require a minimum of 99.9 percent network uptime and availability of crucial resources or better. Three nines or 99.9 percent uptime is the equivalent of 8.76 hours of per server, per annum downtime. And of that figure, some 40 percent of organizations say their business needs demand very high availability four or five nines of uptime percent or percent. Four nines of downtime percent equates to 4.38 hours of per server, per annum unavailability, while five nines percent offers near continuous availability with just minutes of annual per server 7

8 downtime. Dell s EqualLogic PS Series and Dell storage partner EMC s Clariion and Data Domain all deliver five nines percent availability. While many organizations lack the ability to quantify the cost of downtime until after they ve suffered an outage, it is possible to use specific examples of hourly downtime to determine the cost of downtime. So for example, if one hour of per server downtime costs a company $5,000 (US), then a single server that delivers 99.9 percent uptime or 8.76 hours of downtime each year would cost the company $43,800. By contrast, a company that estimates the cost of one hour of per server downtime to be $25,000 would see a monetary loss of $219,000 (US) associated with that one server; multiply that by five (5) servers and the losses would skyrocket to $1.1 million (US). Even a so-called minor outage that costs less than $50,000 could severely and negatively impact an SMB s annual operational expenditure budget and cash flow, particularly during this ongoing economic recession. The majority of SMBs are far less risk tolerant because most lack the financial resources of their large enterprise counterparts. The integrated, interoperable standards based storage and disaster recovery solutions from Dell and VMware work in concert to deliver highly reliable, manageable cost effective solutions and after-market technical services and support minus the finger pointing that many users experience from their vendors in the wake of an outage. Downtime following any type of outage is minimized. This reduces monetary losses and lessens the burden of the IT department. It also helps to mitigate risk and insulate the business from the potential losses that can ensue if their reputation is damaged. Conclusions The combination of Dell virtualized storage and DR used in conjunction with VMware vsphere 4 allows businesses to transition their environments from reactive to proactive. They enable organizations to protect critical data, swiftly recover from outages, drive innovation, improve economies of scale and accelerate ROI. Dell and VMware make virtualized storage and disaster recovery, simple, straightforward and easy to manage, while improving uptime and reliability. The products and services can expand automatically, meet a broad range of needs, and leverage the capabilities of the legacy environment without breaking the budget while simplifying management and enabling customers to leverage the resources of their current infrastructures. p 8