Server Virtualization

Efficiently Retain Virtual Images

Virtualization is a critical tool to improve server efficiencies and reduce costs. The success of server virtualization, however, has created an undesired side effect — rampant storage consumption. As virtualization usage accelerates, data centers are faced with magnified storage challenges: increased capacity, management, floor space, and power/cooling. Permabit offers a solution that helps contain storage management requirements and costly disk utilization while dramatically reducing storage costs.

The VM Image Challenge

Using products such as VMware, administrators can rapidly deploy massive application server environments by creating centralized application images and then deploy these virtual machines into the physical server environment on an as–needed basis. In addition, this same virtualization technology can be used to archive the complete state of a given machine at any point in time, providing a very complete virtual image solution to meet corporate requirements for rapid disaster recovery and for compliance.

As the use of server virtualization proliferates, maintaining the images created to manage and preserve the environment over extended periods becomes a challenge. For example, there are backup copies, disaster recovery copies, and compliance copies to mention just a few. Typically there are multiple copies of each and, as a result, they can consume massive amounts of storage. If kept on primary storage — the most expensive storage in IT environments — it yields the most costly deployment possible. As multiple copies are kept, this practice becomes an excessive consumer of primary storage and the costs escalate as each additional copy is added.

The best approach to retaining virtual images is to keep only the most recent image on primary storage for production use, moving the iterative copies to a less–costly disk–based storage tier. Further savings are delivered through high deduplication rates, as the OS and applications are typically redundant from image to image. This provides a very effective application of deduplication technology which dramatically reduces the storage space requirements and costs.

A solution for managing virtual server images must provide:

• Massive Scalability to address the high capacity and volume of the virtual machine images needed for backup, gold copy storage, compliance snapshots, etc.

• Highly efficient space savings to minimize the cost of retaining these multiple copies, driven by effective deduplication and compression technologies.

• Always–on availability so images are easily accessible when needed.

• Secure protection to ensure that virtual machine images are unchanged and there when you need them.

Permabit Solution: Efficient, Secure Storage for Virtual Images

Permabit’s Dedupe 2.0 Storage solution efficiently manages the long–term retention of virtual machine images, while reducing costs and streamlining management and access. First, images are easily moved from expensive primary storage to Permabit’s highly cost–efficient storage tier, freeing up volumes of primary storage. Second, Permabit’s patented, built–in Scalable Data Reduction™ (SDR) technology applies data deduplication and compression to these highly repetitive images to produce a dramatic decrease in the total storage footprint. Up to 30 to 1 reduction is possible. Third, Permabit’s leading RAIN–EC data protection assures images are free from corruption so they are ready and available when needed. Lastly, Permabit scales to meet even the most extensive VM applications, providing up to 6.9 PB of data for less than $1/GB.

Permabit Enterprise Archive offers:

• Massive Scalability — Up to petabytes of raw storage that grows seamlessly as your need for more storage expands.

• In–line Deduplication — By leveraging Permabit’s patented and built–in Scalable Data Reduction (SDR) reduce storage foot print up to 30 times.

• WORM Retention — Built into Permabit solutions, lets you lock down data to ensure images are unchanged.

• Flexible Retention Policies — Retention periods can be uniquely specified or policy–driven based on file type, origin, or application.

• Intelligent Recovery™ — Leveraging industry–leading RAIN–EC technology that is more effective than RAID.

• Replication — For further protection of data locally or in remote sites.

• High Availability — To ensure you always have access to all stored images.