Enterprise Strategy Group Getting to the bigger truth. SOLUTION SHOWCASE Veritas Resiliency Platform: The Moniker Is New, but the Pedigree Is Solid Date: September 2015 Authors: Jason Buffington, Senior Analyst; and Monya Keane, Research Analyst Abstract: We ve never been more dependent on data and IT services than we are today. With that fact in mind, it is safe to say that backup alone, while extremely important, isn t enough: Organizations must also proactively deploy a resiliency and availability technology that will work in complement with the restoration and preservation capabilities of their data protection solutions. Overview At their core, all IT teams have one mission in common to deliver data and data-related services to end-users who depend on them. Regardless of the size of the organization being supported or the heterogeneity of its hardware platforms and software frameworks, data availability is always imperative. In fact, those users have never been more dependent on data and IT services than they are today (see Figure 1). 1 FIGURE 1. Downtime Tolerance Among End-users Is Low What is the amount of downtime your organization can tolerate from its primary production servers or systems before making the decision to fail over to a BC/DR secondary site or service provider for its high priority applications compared to normal production workloads? (Percent of respondents, N=391) Standard amount of tolerable downtime for high priority applications Standard amount of tolerable downtime for normal production workloads 7% 2% 22% 22% 21% 18% 15% 11% 14% 22% 15% 7% 5% 4% 5% 3% 4% 1% 0% 1% No downtime ever Less than 15 minutes 15 minutes to less than 1 hour 1 hour to less than 2 2 to less than 4 4 to less than 6 6 to less than 12 12 to 24 More than 24 Don t know 1 Source: ESG Research Study, The Evolving Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Landscape, June 2015. This ESG Solution Showcase was commissioned by Veritas and is distributed under license from ESG.
Solution Showcase: The Veritas Resiliency Platform 2 As Figure 1 shows, high-priority tier-1 applications are, unsurprisingly, marked by very low downtime tolerances. But interestingly, even with so-called normal production workloads, many organizations have a downtime tolerance of less than two these days. Often, in the case of manual operations and a recovery strategy that relies solely on backup, IT needs more than two to (a) discover an availability problem has occurred, (b) diagnose the issue, (c) restore the data, and (d) resume service. Thus, it is safe to say that backup alone, while extremely important, isn t enough: for those high-priority tier-1 applications, organizations must also consider proactively deploying resiliency and availability technologies that will work in complement with the restoration and preservation capabilities of the data protection solution(s). The Accidental Architecture of Availability Today Most organizations that ESG surveys report they have deployed multiple, disparate data protection and availability technologies across workloads. That s actually just fine: For each database, hypervisor, etc., a different resiliency mechanism can make sense on a per-platform, per-business unit, or per-geography basis. In fact, even with a single platform such as one production database, multiple methods for achieving resiliency might be in use (see Figure 2). 2 FIGURE 2. Multiple Availability Mechanisms Are Being Used with Databases Approximately what percentage of your organization s production databases have the following availability technologies applied to them? What percentage of production databases do you anticipate will have these methods applied to them within 24 months? (Mean, N=178) % of production databases today % of production databases in 24 months 32% 34% 25% 29% 22% 25% 25% 29% 23% 24% Application or database mirroring Application or O/S clustering e.g., Microsoft cluster services Application or O/S replication e.g., third-party replication software with failover Infrastructure clustering i.e., VMware/Hyper-V clusters with VM-restart Storage replication i.e., between arrays Numerous mechanisms are in use now, and it seems likely that their usage will increase further in the coming two years. The phenomenon isn t restricted to databases, either. ESG sees similarly diverse availability mechanisms being used (and similarly rising deployment rates) with file services and VMs as well. 2 Source: ESG Research Report, Data Protection Personas and Methods, February 2015.
Solution Showcase: The Veritas Resiliency Platform 3 However, even though each separate solution may make great sense to use, collectively, multiple separate approaches can create challenges. For example, the use of disparate solutions can: Cause inefficiencies and drive up costs Each method makes sense from a per-platform or per-data set perspective, but the lack of efficiency caused by multiple availability mechanisms drives up complexity in the overall environment, adds infrastructure CapEx costs, and increases operational costs for management. Create challenges in monitoring and ensuring coverage These days, lots of different stakeholders and beneficiaries are interested and invested in IT resiliency. So, IT pros responsible for service delivery might find themselves sandwiched between their IT peers who are responsible for databases or hypervisors on one side, and the beneficiaries of the IT services (line-of-business managers, the legal department, etc.) on the other. It is difficult to satisfy every constituent and keep an eye on every platform when many point technologies are trying to achieve IT resiliency in their own ways. It s an especially serious matter in virtualized environments: ESG research shows that five of the top six challenges reported by respondents regarding protecting virtual server environments are visibility related (see Figure 3). 3 FIGURE 3. Protecting Virtualized Environments Comes with Visibility Challenges Which of the following would you characterize as challenges for protecting your organization s virtual server environment? Which would you consider to be your organization s primary virtual server data protection challenge? (Percent of respondents, N=375) Recoverability of data 15% 45% Validating backup success Validating recovery success Identifying inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the backup process Tracking capacity trends and consumption 9% 8% 7% 6% 32% 32% 39% 39% Primary virtual server data protection challenge All virtual server data protection challenges Simplified views across virtual infrastructure 6% 31% ESG Recommendations for Heterogeneous Data Protection and Availability Recommendation 1: Plan for a Hybrid Architecture Different IT organizations have varying degrees of heterogeneity in their core production platforms (both the physical servers and the VMs running under different hypervisors). So, it s best to plan to leverage or even expand the use of a full spectrum of data protection and availability approaches (see Figure 4). 3 Source: ESG Research Report, Trends in Protecting Highly Virtualized Environments, to be published.
Solution Showcase: The Veritas Resiliency Platform 4 FIGURE 4. The Spectrum of Data Protection Not only do data protection and availability methods vary based on the underlying platforms, but they also vary based on the workloads nature and their business value for different locations and user populations. Likewise, data protection activity doesn t have to happen exclusively via on-prem management: IT organizations supporting midmarket-sized companies or the edge locations of large enterprises may want to go hybrid, i.e., leverage cloud-based service providers as a desirable augmentation of their own IT infrastructure to achieve resiliency. Recommendation 2: Embrace a Single IT Resiliency Strategy (Even if Using Multiple Methods) For many environments, the use of multiple methods across multiple platforms and locations is inevitable that is, if IT wants to achieve the availability levels the organization demands while partnering/working with different platform administrators and business unit owners. But that fact shouldn t translate into following disparate strategies or maintaining different mindsets regarding how resiliency, protection, and availability should be achieved. Instead, the IT organization should (while leveraging unifying mechanisms where possible and accepting separate approaches where warranted across the behaviors depicted in Figure 4) seek to establish a single overall strategy for achieving resiliency, regardless of the myriad tactical methods it may deploy to actually deliver it. Recommendation 3: Over-communicate Through Monitoring and Collaboration As mentioned, resiliency stakeholders include platform owners, business-unit leaders/executives and their teams who depend on the data, and of course, the IT people responsible for delivering durable IT. Considering that a range of technical and non-technical stakeholders are affected by IT s resiliency goals and single availability-delivery strategy, it s impossible to overstate how important over-communication is for those stakeholders and beneficiaries: Over-communication about the strategy, its implementation, and the success of the various IT toolsets being used. Without effective dashboard-based monitoring and effective communication/notification, confidence levels among the virtualization administrators, IT operations teams, data protection specialists, and all those stakeholders and users can deteriorate. One Solution to Consider: Veritas Resiliency Platform The Veritas Resiliency Platform moniker is new, but its pedigree in availability is solid. Specifically, Veritas has been producing availability technologies as an overlay to existing IT infrastructure for nearly 20 years as a standalone company and for ten years (until recently) as the data protection arm of Symantec. Previous products included Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server, now under the Veritas InfoScale family. Both were well-designed to enhance data availability and increase IT agility.
Solution Showcase: The Veritas Resiliency Platform 5 A Unified Approach to Ensuring the Availability of IT Services Across Myriad Physical and Virtual Servers Core to the architecture of Resiliency Platform is Veritas s appreciation that its technologies and expertise are being overlaid across an existing heterogeneous IT infrastructure. As such, Veritas designed Resiliency Platform to work not only with existing IT resiliency mechanisms found on physical servers, but also with both of the mainstream hypervisor technologies shipping today VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. It also works for all the important line-of-business applications, some of which also boast their own internal resiliency technologies (e.g., SQL Server database mirroring). Unified Instrumentation for Monitoring and Ensuring Availability As Figure 5 shows, this Veritas solution is not just about delivering higher IT resiliency via automated recovery procedures, but also about monitoring and communicating the status of the individual platforms and the SLAs being achieved. FIGURE 5. The Veritas Resiliency Platform Console Source: Veritas, 2015
Solution Showcase: The Veritas Resiliency Platform 6 A Unified Architecture for Availability Across Data Centers and Clouds IT organizations are embracing the cloud for various data protection and availability-related initiatives, including data backup and BC/DR. 4 A key feature of the Resiliency Platform architecture is its ability to support multi-site self-managed IT resiliency and to leverage multiple cloud-based solutions, as represented in Figure 6. FIGURE 6. Veritas Resiliency Platform Solution Architecture The Bigger Truth Source: Veritas, 2015 Businesses are demanding more from their IT teams than ever before in terms of agility and availability. However, IT often had to cobble together myriad data protection approaches that each made sense at the time, but ended up yielding resiliency-related inefficiencies and complexities that are unacceptable. Organizations should be planning for a hybrid protection architecture that includes physical and virtual solutions and takes application-specific requirements into consideration. The hybrid architecture could cover secondary sites and encompass cloud services to achieve the high level of IT resiliency that businesses require today. With so much depending on the durability of the infrastructure, whom should IT partner with to achieve it? One company that has been an availability innovator for more than 20 years is Veritas. And with its new Resiliency Platform offering, Veritas has again raised the bar on heterogeneous and hardware-agnostic resiliency solutions for the modern enterprise. All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188. Enterprise Strategy Group is an IT analyst, research, validation, and strategy firm that provides actionable insight and intelligence to the global IT community. 4 Source: ESG Research Report, 2015 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2015. www.esg-global.com 2015 by The Enterprise contact@esg-global.com Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. P. 508.482.0188