Today we live in the “Information Age” in which all sorts of knowledge is available at the drop of a hat – or shall we say the stroke of a few computer keys. The problem? A good portion of the information available may not be as accurate as you might expect. Our goal is to provide expert industry knowledge from a reputable source. With that goal in mind we’ll talk about some common myths about virtualization DR.
Virtualization Disaster Recovery can be described as taking a virtual copy or image and deploying it on another server as a backup. This process is generally used to decrease downtime and data loss. As this process becomes more and more popular among IT professionals it’s important to know what’s true about the process – and what isn’t necessarily accurate. Let’s dig in.
Myth #1: Storage Based Replication is Ideal for Availability
This myth refers to storage-based replication versus server-based replication. Storage based replication has slower performance, often comes with hidden costs, and is limited in storage vendor arrays. Server based replication is much more flexible as far as cross-platform compatibility and has a better overall performance.
Myth #2: You Can Only Protect VMs With Agentless Protection
Agentless protection on its own can often limit the flexibility of protection. While agentless protection is certainly needed, it should be in tandem with agent-based protection to increase flexibility and overall protection.
Myth #3: Virtualization Is a One-Way Avenue
Workloads need to be agile across multiple environments including physical, virtual, and cloud. However, many migration and protection solutions do not allow for a path back to the original source.
Myth #4: Agentless Protection is OK For All Applications
The truth is applications on different levels and tiers need to have different types of protection. A good disaster recovery strategy will take advantage of real-time replication for the most critical applications, this cannot be accomplished with agentless protection.
Myth #5: RPO and RTO Are The Same Thing
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) are sometimes confused or misunderstood. While both are part of business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning they are not the same. Recovery Point Objective is the maximum period in which data might be lost if a major incident occurs. Recovery Time Objective is an amount of time a business can be without service before incurring significant risks or losses. Bot are imperative to a successful business continuity plan.
These are just a few of the common IT myths out there related to disaster recovery, and more specifically virtualization disaster recovery. We’ll continue to dig deeper into certain topics to find common myths as well as common accepted practices so you can better educate yourself on the finer points of information technology, the cloud, virtualization, and more. Of course, if you have questions don’t hesitate to contact Neovera to find out how we can help you achieve IT success.