Challenges and Solution

The IT organization at VMware faced several challenges. With the growth in infrastructure, its existing datacenter was running into physical space constraints. The organization's existing environment utilized EMC NetWorker for backups to both physical tape and CIFS-attached Data Domain deduplication appliances, implemented to eliminate the use (and offsite removal) of 200 physical tapes weekly. The organization was also replicating to a Savvis co-location datacenter in Palo Alto, California, for its disaster recovery site. It clearly needed a larger, more stable, and environmentally efficient datacenter. But it also wanted a solution that would meet its current and future data protection needs, so it decided to reevaluate its current backup strategy and re-architect its environment.

During the evaluation of its backup environment, VMware's IT department found it was facing severe network bottlenecks. As expected, the organization utilizes its VMware solutions to consolidate and maximize the use of available servers. VMware was over 95% virtualized and the virtual machine guest systems shared the same underlying physical network interface on the physical servers. VMware's existing backup methods consumed 100% of the available network during its 24 x 7 backup window, creating severe backup bottlenecks. With too much data to protect and shrinking backup windows, the organization was faced with staggering full backups for each client once a week and then doing incremental backups the rest of the week at best. According to Chi, "With expected data growth, we knew this approach would not scale."