Optimizing Backups for any Storage

Agenda

• Corporate Overview• Why virtualization backup demands your

attention• Characteristics of backup and the

variables that affect its performance• PHD Strategies for Optimizing your

Storage for Backup and Recovery• Q&A

PHD Vision

Virtual data protection and ensuring availability of physical, virtual and cloud environments should be easier

IT professionals who use our products should be excited about them!

That’s why we put our users and their data first in everything we do, to deliver:• Powerful virtualization management software to make your job easier• Rock star treatment• Exceptional value

Customers call our products amazing because they can:“set-it & forget-it and it just works”

We call it “unmatched value for your virtual world”

Who We Are

Provider of virtualization backup and monitoring of physical, virtual and cloud environments

• Products are powerful, easy to use and affordable

Experiencing record growth• 9 consecutive quarters of record growth

Industry leadership• Only backup company Citrix has invested in• Product of the year: Search Server Virtualization• Reader’s choice award: Virtualization Admin.com

Who We Serve

What Makes PHD Virtual Unique?

Unmatched Value:Effective products:

• Powerful and scalable• Value evident out-of-the-box

Easier to use:• Easy to download, install and use

Lower cost:• Priced at a fraction of the cost of competitors

Ultimate Fan Club!“I can’t afford to spend much time managing backups. 

PHD makes the process a piece of cake. How they put so much functionality into such an easy to use product, I don’t know, but they did”.

- Marek Friedl, Hardt Equipment

“PHD Virtual allows you to easily deploy multiple Virtual Backup Appliances thatcreate unprecedented scalability, without the cost and complexity of other solutions.”

- Virtualization Blogger, Roy Mikes

Customer Success

Consistent Customer Growth

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PHD Virtual Backup & Replication• Supports Citrix XenServer and VMware

vSphere

• Installs and configures in 10 minutes and requires no training

• Performs 3 to 5 times faster on incremental backups

• Uses less storage than any competitor

• Unique Virtual Backup Appliance that plugs into the Hypervisor; scales quicker and easier

• Requires no physical machines, 3rd party OS or software

Why Virtualization Backup Demands More Attention

• More Data is being stored on VM’s• Organizations trusting their critical data to virtualization• VM backups have remained an afterthought• Creating new VM’s creates more backup work but your

backup window hasn’t changed • Shorter RTO/RPO windows• Desire to decrease admin-hours to manage backups• Organizations struggling to adhere to backup storage

policies• Demand for better disaster recovery

Characteristics of a Backup and the variables

that affect its performance

Characteristics of a Backup

The Backup Process is an intensive process• High number IOPS (reads) on the production virtual disk

storage• Data compression is a CPU intensive operation • Dedupe (hashing) is a CPU intensive operation• High number of IOPS (reads & writes) to the backup

storage target• Network use, depends on the location of both the

production data and the storage target

Variables that affect performance

• Replication• Network• Backup Storage

ProtocolsArchitectures

Replication

• Replication adds an additional “read” load on the primary site

Ideal solutions will not impact production storage twice to perform replication

• Don’t overlap processes

Separate backup and replication jobs execution times

Network

• Are production data stores network based?• Is the backup data store on network storage?

Leveraging this as attached virtual disk (providing the network storage to the hypervisor) provides best backup performance

• Size of the Connection • Competing traffic or processes running at that time

Backup Storage Protocols

File level (NFS / CIFS)• Presented as “managed-space”, which

includes additional overhead• Are not optimized for high IOPS (heavy

random read/write)• Require additional overhead to handle

possible concurrent access from multiple sources

Backup Storage Protocols cont’d

Block Level • Presents raw block storage to the

application• Allows the application to create the optimal

file system locally• Block level protocols include:

Local disks (SATA, SCSI, etc.)Fibre ChanneliSCSI

Backup Storage Architectures

Where your backup storage is located can also impact performance• “Local Storage” – hypervisor connected storage

(FC, iSCSI, SCSI)• Network storage – NFS or CIFS shares

NFS can leverage “block level storage” by giving the share to the hypervisor rather than the backup appliance

NFS & CIFS storage directly connected to your backup solution it is treated as file level storage

Backup Storage Architectures cont’d…

How your storage is configured can have an affect on your backup performance• Distributed storage, increasing the number of

spindles available, increasing the number of parallel operations

• On the backup storage, select the best write performance RAID level of those available (RAID 10 is better than RAID 5)

PHD Strategies for Optimizing your Storage for Backup and Recovery

Full and Incremental Backup Mode

Full FullInc Inc Inc Inc Inc Inc Inc Inc Inc Inc

Full & Incremental

Virtual Full

Initial V Full V Full V Full V Full V Full V Full V Full V Full V Full V Full V Full V Full

When to Use Virtual Full Backups

• Looking for deduplication at the sourceSaves on storageSaves on network bandwidth

• Want long-term retention on disk• Need very predictable backup windows

Virtual Full Storage ModelBest Performance Model: Attached disk storage through the hypervisor leveraging block level protocols(Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, NFS)

When to Use Full / Incremental Backups

• You are writing to:Deduplicating storage (ExaGrid, Data Domain,

Windows Server 2012)You are going to a cloud gateway or WAN optimizerYou are backing up directly to off-site storageCIFS/NFS

• You must go to tape/removable media frequently

NOTE: You can leverage both modes

Key Takeaways

• Don’t forget to optimize your backup storage

• Consider competing processes, storage protocols, and network

• We have flexible storage options to optimize backup and recovery processes

• We support all storage types and have customers using them successfully

866-710-1882 (USA and Canada)+1-267-298-5320 (International)

sales@phdvirtual.com

Q & A