Tag: disaster recovery

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VMware backup: Key decision points if you migrate away from VMware

Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition of VMware for US$69bn led to disruptive changes in the virtualisation provider’s pricing.

Key here is a move from perpetual licences to a subscription model. This has left some enterprises facing higher costs, with some considering a move to alternative virtualisation environments.

For those considering that, the challenge is to ensure any migration provides adequate backup and recovery measures for new hypervisors. This is as well as protecting remaining VMware workloads.

VMware: Twist or stick?

The main reason CIOs cite for moving away from VMware is cost, with worries over increasing overheads from the new subscription model prominent. VMware also discontinued its free edition of VMware vSphere ESXi, which was popular with smaller firms.

For enterprises looking to move, VMware alternatives include competing virtualisation technologies, such as Nutanix, Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle Linux Virtualization. There are also open source options that include Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Linux Kernel-level Virtual Machines (KVM) and Proxmox Virtual Environment.

As yet, there are few signs of a mass exodus, however. One survey, carried out by backup provider Nakivo, suggested a third of its customers planned to move away from VMware to Proxmox. The supplier points to a smaller number of customers moving to Nutanix and Hyper-V.

This suggests a larger percentage of VMware users have either decided to stay with the technology and the new commercial terms, some of which – including simpler storage licensing – can favour some workloads.

“Naturally, the first reaction is to say, ‘Right, I’m going to go somewhere else, I’m going to use somebody else’s technology’,” says Patrick Smith, field chief technology officer for EMEA at Pure Storage.

“And some organisations have fairly rapidly moved off VMware onto other platforms, but they are either small or very agile to be able to do that.”

Other enterprises might be biding their time, not least because moving between hypervisor platforms is complex and carries risk. Nor do the alternatives offer all VMware’s features and functionality – or not in one place, at least.

Backup, recovery and VMware alternatives

If moving workloads from one hypervisor to another is difficult, then ensuring those workloads and data are backed up adds another layer of complexity.

Much will depend on how an enterprise currently protects its systems, including VMware, alternative hypervisors it is considering, and the backup and recovery tools it uses.

For the majority of organisations, it is probable the data protection systems they use will work if they choose to stay with VMware as a major platform or migrate to alternatives Tony Lock, Freeform Dynamics

The good news is the larger backup and disaster recovery suppliers already have support for competing virtualisation platforms. Hyper-V, in particular, is well supported for businesses that also run on Microsoft infrastructure.

At the same time, providers such as Veeam, Rubrik and Nakivo have strengthened support for open source platforms, especially Proxmox.

This raises the prospect of firms being able to continue with their current backup and recovery provider, even if they move to a mixed approach to virtualisation. Alternatively, if their current disaster recovery supplier falls short, there is the chance to move to a toolset that does support a multi-supplier approach.

“For the majority of organisations, it is probable the data protection systems they use will work if they choose to stay with VMware as a major platform or migrate to alternatives,” suggests Tony Lock, principal analyst at Freeform Dynamics. “This is especially likely to be the case if they have a data protection solution that protects a mixed environment.”

Out of the box?

However, even if a data protection or backup and recovery tool supports alternatives to VMware, IT teams should anticipate carrying out configuration and testing before their alternatives go live.

If they do not, there is a risk that by attempting to save money on licensing, they expose the business to risk and additional costs down the line.

Backup is turning out to be a quite a polarising aspect of moving away from VMware Bruce Kornfeld, StorMagic

VMware’s maturity and market share means products such as ESXi and vSAN are well-understood and well-supported by independent software suppliers, integrators and in-house teams. Not all hypervisors enjoy that industry support.

One area where this is apparent is where backup and recovery providers offer “agentless” integration directly with hypervisors. This is not – yet – on offer for all the alternatives, and CIOs might need to consider agent-based backup.

“Backup is turning out to be a quite a polarising aspect of moving away from VMware,” says Bruce Kornfeld, chief product officer at StorMagic, a supplier of hyper-converged storage.

“The leaders in virtualisation have had the attention of the backup software industry over the last 20-plus years, and tight agentless integration directly with their hypervisors is something that many users have come to expect. However, the backup software industry hasn’t had the research and development capacity to work with every hypervisor on the market – there just hasn’t been the return on investment in the past.”

“VMware customers that have made the decision to move away from VMware need to re-address their backup strategy,” he says. “They need to look at using an agent-based approach. This is the way backup has been done for decades and will work with any hypervisor.” This should not, Kornfeld says, come with extra costs.

Firms also need to consider the time and resources they need to set aside for backup and disaster recovery testing, once they have decided to move workloads away from VMware. This includes testing file and virtual machine-based backup routines.

In fact, changing hypervisors can present a good opportunity to review the strength of disaster recovery and backup arrangements across the business. These might not be as robust as CIOs expect.

“It is fair to say that some organisations are not totally happy with their data protection solutions and processes,” says Tony Lock.

“In such circumstances, it is certainly something they will need to look at, but the issue is do they have the resources and budgets to potentially modify two important systems at once? And even if they do, would they be happy that they can manage the risk of change, since any major platform change carries some element of risk?”

It is here where careful supplier evaluation and selection, and potentially bringing in additional supplier or third-party engineering support, should pay for itself.

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Where IT comes from: Pure Storage’s lean Czech assembly

As with Pure Storage’s research and development (R&D) efforts, its final product assembly also rests on a three-site system. Flash arrays put together at regional sites – two in Texas and one in Czechia – cater for regional demand. We visited its European assembly location in Pardubice, Czechia, to see how it works.

Pure occupies a small part of a site run by Taiwanese contract manufacturing giant Foxconn, which is Czechia’s second largest exporter after Skoda and employs 4,500 people in the country.

Its relationship with Pure stretches back 10 years at the Pardubice site, which is built in part of a former Tesla (the Czech electronics company) factory that dates to 1964. The facility covers a vast area devoted to Pure Storage FlashArray and FlashBlade assembly, of which 30 and four are produced per shift respectively. 

Pure’s Pardobice operation forms one third of its global assembly capacity, with arrays made to order on a lead time of less than two weeks from customer order to fulfilment. The plant also produces upgrade components for customers on the Evergreen subscription model, as well as replacement units. Ordinarily, it runs only one eight-hour shift, but can take up the slack from Pure’s other two facilities should the need arise, as part of its business continuity/disaster recovery provision, by running three shifts.

Components come in as sub-assemblies, such as controllers and power supplies, and components, such as central processing units and memory, from plants in Vietnam, Mexico and the US, by air. China is not on the supplier list, says Pure Storage supply chain manager Jiri Černy, or at least it won’t be soon.

“We’re working to have zero from China, because of the geo-political situation,” he says.

Production is “almost just-in-time”, says Černy, referring to the tight timescales used to deliver components directly to production. In Pure’s case, a larger warehouse on the Foxconn site – “thousands of pallets’ worth” – but some distance away holds stocks of parts that are delivered to the assembly area twice a shift, with two days’ worth held there. 

Work in the facility runs on lean manufacturing principles, and the kind of upstream-downstream information flows that implies. 

“Six Sigma and lean are built-in to make sure we learn from mistakes,” says Černy. “It’s OK to make mistakes, but stupid to do it twice or three times.”

Loyal and valued staff

Shopfloor staff “are not skilled”, says Černy, but he is keen to emphasise they know the job well and are valued. And it’s an environment with strict controls on static electricity owing to the risk to damage to componentry.

“They are mostly women,” he says. “I think that’s good. They are sensitive. They know the value of the product. We have long retention periods – they’ve been here years – and are multi-level operators that know every [assembly] station.”

Six Sigma and lean are built-in to make sure we learn from mistakes. It’s OK to make mistakes, but stupid to do it twice or three times Jiri Černy, Pure Storage

“They’re even so experienced that they can work directly with the engineers and give good feedback,” adds Černy. 

Production is tightly monitored, with component and assembly barcodes tracked through their production lifecycle. Assembly staff work to instruction manuals viewed via on-bench monitors. Not because they don’t know their work well enough, but because it constantly changes as equipment configurations change due to feedback received from the field.

Each workstation is monitored by CCTV, not to keep an eye on staff, says Černy, but to provide evidence if damage or faults are discovered down the line.

“We can see who built what, and when, and whether anything went wrong, with processes monitored matched to parts serial numbers,” says Černy. “So, if something happens, we can say it is not at the Foxconn site. We’ve had cases where there has been damage and have proved it didn’t happen here.”

After assembly, arrays go through rigorous testing, for general base configuration (“vanilla”) and customer-specified configurations (“chocolate”). The plant runs a constant temperature of 24°C to mimic datacentre temperatures, while there are also 35°C “burn in” chambers where hardware is stress tested beyond temperatures normally encountered.

This happens to all FlashBlade arrays due to their higher performance levels, and the first 1,000 of any new configuration of an array.

At the end of the line, arrays are fully inspected and packaged for shipment to customers. 

That’s not the end of the story, however. As we’ve seen, testing of systems built to replicate customer setups can continue for years after at Pure’s R&D centres. Meanwhile, components and sub-assemblies are also refreshed for those that pay for Pure products via their Evergreen subscription model. All of which, arguably, contributes to lean principles in its operations.

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Where IT comes from: Behind the scenes at Pure Storage’s European R&D centre

You’re a $2.8bn storage supplier with flash arrays at the core of your business. How do you do research and development (R&D), test new products, test customer workload issues, and test array products over years-long timescales for issues that only arise as software, network and application changes concatenate and interact?

Meanwhile, you are a global business with R&D and developer teams across time zones, all at work on ongoing monthly and quarterly updates, and incessant efforts to optimise storage controller software.

The base product is essentially the same, so effective collaboration and information sharing between teams spread across continents is key. But at the same time, you must also test regional customer-specific array configurations.

The Pure Storage solution is to divide responsibility between hardware and software, while also sharing specific R&D and testing capability between three sites.

There is Santa Clara in California, which is its global headquarters and handles hardware and software R&D and testing. There is also Bangalore in India, which only carries out software R&D and testing.

And there is Prague in Czechia, which recently opened its doors to the IT press. Here, we take a look at what goes on behind the scenes in R&D and product testing at Pure Storage (and its nearby array assembly operation).

Capabilities across the three centres are in many ways duplicated, which sounds counter-productive. But it’s not quite as simple as that, according to engineering vice-president and Pure’s Prague site leader Paul Melmon.

“Generally speaking, the same capabilities exist across all sites, except Santa Clara with its hardware development facilities,” he says.

“We try to make projects run autonomously and to minimise cross-time zone meetings,” says Melmon, adding that information can be shared globally in other ways, such as in Git repositories. 

“Lots of companies split projects into many pieces and distribute them,” says chief technology officer Rob Lee. “We choose significant parts of individual products and give them to individual sites, and have product managers for specific products sitting locally.”

“We give a lot of thought to what to centralise and what to not,” says Melmon. “We have rules of engagement that aim at communications that can minimise the number of meetings.”

R&D, testing and talent in Prague

As mentioned, Pure’s Prague site is dedicated to software research, development and testing. It runs thousands of ongoing and custom test routines on hundreds of racks of software. These are divided into “persistent” and “non-persistent” testing, says engineering manager Tom Healy.

Non-persistent is ephemeral. It tests for issues in specific customer deployment configurations, or the impact of updates on controller code.

Persistent testing is long-term. It can be very long-term, in fact, with racks in place with, for example, generation upon generation of Pure Storage FlashBlade file and object storage deployed.

“Sometimes things can take years to occur,” says Healy.

“Our testbeds include, for example, FlashBlade capacity that dates back to the first generation [2016], some virtualisation, and a Windows application platform. All of this will run for years, to follow the lifecycle of customer systems and to test for the effect of changes to software and hardware, and its stability,” says Healy.

“And, FlashBlade uses Ethernet, so we are checking what happens when changes happen in the workload, simulation of new cabling, media, hitting it with broadcast storms, simulating signal degradation, etc,” he adds. 

Meanwhile, at the Prague facility, hundreds of engineers work constantly on storage array software to meet ongoing monthly and quarterly updates. 

Pure’s Prague R&D facility has just celebrated its five-year anniversary. It is resident in the Amazon building (no relation) and others in the riverside Karlin district. There it employs 600 people – 50% Czech, 50% from elsewhere – with up to 50 nationalities on-site.

Prague was chosen as a European centre because of its proximity to so many of Pure’s customers, but also, says Melmon, because of the availability of talent. “It’s on a level with Silicon Valley,” he says, and its accessibility in terms of transport links, universities, graduates in computer science, cost of living and general likeability of the city.

Speaking of the River City complex in which Pure is located, Melmon describes it as having a “South of Market” feel, referring to the fashionable area of San Francisco that became a honeypot for startups in the 1990s. “It’s the place to be if you’re in tech and AI [artificial intelligence]. There are meetups in the evening. It’s the cool new place to be in Prague.”

But it’s not just a cool place to work and live. Melmon points to the 19.7% figure, which is the proportion of revenue Pure spends on R&D. 

Prague is the biggest Pure Storage R&D centre outside the US and has delivered about a third of its FlashArray product development. Meanwhile, FlashBlade//S was jointly designed and tested there, while key elements of the Pure Fusion workload management platform and its Pure1 AIOps were developed in the Czech capital. Meanwhile, 100% of Portworx Data Services and Pure’s disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offering came from there too.

That’s the result, with Prague as a key pillar in the three-site R&D and testing strategy of Pure Storage.

Nearby, also in Czechia, is one of its global assembly centres, which you can read about here.

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