Virtualization

CommVault | EqualLogic | Hitachi | IBM

As more and more customers implement a virtualization strategy in their data center, More Group continues to provide leading edge solutions to help customers optimize the backup/recovery and data storage infrastructure. An integral part of a virtualization strategy must be accompanied by an effective backup/recovery strategy and fully tested DR solution.

Virtualization separates applications, operating systems, and storage from physical hardware to enable more flexible, scalable, fault-tolerant, and cost-effective IT infrastructures

Solutions we deploy include:

CommVault Solutions - VMware, Overview

CommVault® Singular Information Management™ software makes VMware adoption easy. CommVault offers you a full range of options for managing VMware systems along with physical systems also in the environment. CommVault provides you with particularly strong advantages for:

• Delivering more value from server consolidation
• Extending disaster recovery benefits obtained with server virtualization to data management
• Using VMotion while preserving continuous data recovery for clients
CommVault works closely with the team at VMware to provide best-in-class data management solutions that are certified with VMware's latest technology. This alliance helps to ensure a great experience for our mutual customers.

Working with VMware Consolidated Backup
CommVault offers a VCB Certification Kit, which includes technical information and deployment details for using CommVault Galaxy Backup & Recovery with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB).

Gaining More Value from Server Consolidation
If you are considering VMware as a means to consolidate server systems but you are concerned about the complexities of managing production data in virtualized environments, CommVault Singular Information Management helps to simplify the process. You get all of the same options for managing virtualized data as for data on physical systems. You can also take advantage of advanced VMware capabilities, which include protecting the VMware disk files to get crash-consistent recovery of the entire virtualized server, and VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to consolidate backup without having to saturate your business network with backup data.

CommVault can also help you adopt VMware virtualization, by migrating Windows file system data from physical to virtual environments with Continuous Data Replicator (CDR).

For more information on the options that CommVault software enables for managing server consolidation with VMware, see the CommVault Solution Sheet for VMware. For technical details that will help you select among options, see the CommVault White Paper for VMware.

Extending Virtualization Benefits to Disaster Recovery

VMware is useful for reducing the equipment required to rebuild a production environment at a disaster recovery location. However, your data management software may have its own requirements for identical servers and storage which prevent you from taking full advantage of VMware's capabilities. CommVault data management is flexible and provides unique, built-in Disaster Recovery (DR) Backup capabilities that can rebuild the CommVault environment on dissimilar equipment quickly and efficiently. Take full advantage of the cost savings, and accomplish your disaster recovery mission by using CommVault software with VMware.

For more information on the Disaster Recovery methods that CommVault software enables for applications and file system data, see the CommVault Disaster Recovery Best Practices Guide or contact a More Group Inc Sales Consultant.

Using VMotion while Preserving Continuous Data Recovery for Clients

VMware enables you to move guest-hosted environments from one ESX Server system to another, so that you can perform server maintenance and hardware upgrades transparently. CommVault software enables you to take full advantage of VMotion - even for clients protected with VMware Consolidated Backup - with the unique CommVault ProxyHost capability.

Use CommVault software to ensure continuous, simple, one-step restore of client data. Take full advantage of the virtualization benefits offered with VMotion.

Storage and Replication for VMWare - iSCSI
Building a virtualized Server and Storage infrastructure In VMware environments, networked access to storage assets is required. To effectively leverage the capabilities of VMware's virtualized infrastructure, including VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduling and High Availability, storage must not only be network-accessible, but high performance, highly available, and easily scaled without impacting applications or limiting performance as workloads change and grow. Networked storage must be simple to deploy, flexible to manage, and intrinsically reduce ongoing costs to truly reap the economic benefits of server consolidation. EqualLogic's virtualized iSCSI SAN's are the most-cost effective enterprise storage solution for VMware environments.

Core Benefits of EqualLogic VMware Solutions
Comprehensive Initiator support: EqualLogic is listed on VMware's VI3 Hardware Compatibility list and has comprehensive support of VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMware Server across leading hardware and software initiators of the host operating systems as well as native initiators available in VMware's ESX Server 3.

MPIO and Failover Capabilities: PS Series arrays support MPIO, failover and NIC teaming technologies to provide robust path and controller failover, as well as aggregate I/O bandwidth to meet even the most demanding virtualized server workloads.

Enterprise Data Protection and Disaster Recovery: Snapshots, clones, and replication are core, built-in features of the PS Series applicable in a variety of ways to enhance the VMware environment with low overhead, low cost data protection and disaster recovery solutions.

Clustering: EqualLogic is fully compatible with VMware Server application clustering based on Microsoft's MSCS as well as VMware Infrastructure 3 High Availability (HA) feature to allow for rapid, non-disruptive failover of ESX Servers.

Simplified Management: Group Manager, EqualLogic's unified SAN management tool, provides a simple, intuitive storage management and provisioning tool, consolidating all storage on the SAN into a unified storage resource simply configurable and managed through a centralized interface. The perfect complement to VMware's Virtual Center tool.

Optimized Performance: EqualLogic offers unparalleled performance for your VMware environment with its PS Series storage arrays. The PS Series' Auto-load balancing capability seamlessly spreads data across all active RAID sets, maximizing performance by intelligently optimizing all available network connections, cache, controllers and drives. Learn more: Comprehensive Automatic Load Balancing Delivers Easier SAN Optimization Webcast.

Understanding the Hitachi Approach to Storage Virtualization
"When Hitachi decided to offer a heterogeneous storage virtualization product, it made a smart move. Unlike competitors that started from scratch to write new controller software, it chose instead to add external storage support to its most robust, most highly featured, most market proven storage array. As a result, it has no direct competition for its integrated heterogeneous virtualization features in the high-end storage array market."
-"Storage Virtualization: HDS Universal Volume Manager," by Robert E.Passmore, Gartner Group, Dec. 22, 2006.

Hitachi Data Systems maintains that its controller-based virtualization technology offering is the simplest yet most robust way to implement virtualization in today's storage environment. Organizations benefit from years of development with an already mature set of storage services feature set that is now also available to externally attached storage arrays.

The Hitachi intelligent tiered storage architecture provides the ability to classify data and then move it to the right tier of storage efficiently and non-disruptively, ensuring applications are always available. Data can be moved seamlessly between the different tiers with a logical layer of management and control.

Any-to-any replication, seamless data migration and centralized data management are all easily in reach when using Hitachi virtualization solutions. A single set of management tools that make it easy to perform snapshot, migration, archival, backup and replication of data across heterogeneous storage systems, even from mainframe systems to lower cost SATA storage, are available today from Hitachi.

Instead of requiring extra hardware layers in the form of management servers, application blades, new switches, and separate management software, Hitachi virtualization is easily deployed by enabling an existing software key within its Universal Storage Platform or Network Storage Controller. It's that simple.

IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller
Designed to combine storage capacity from multiple disk systems into a single reservoir of capacity that can be better managed as a business resource and not as separate boxes.
Additionally the SAN volume Controller has been designed to:

• to help increase storage utilization by providing host applications with more flexible access to capacity
• to help improve productivity of storage administrators by enabling management of heterogeneous storage systems using a common interface
• to support improved application availability by insulating host applications from changes to the physical storage infrastructure
• to enable a tiered storage environment in which the cost of storage can be better matched to the value of data
• to support advanced copy services from higher-to lower-cost devices and across storage systems from multiple vendors


For further information or if you would like to discuss virtualization options for your specific environment please contact our Sales Consultants at 1-800-952-3215.