Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2023

organizations cannot manage them in the same manner as the rest of their cloud infrastructure. appliances with reduced features and functionality . All major deduplication providers offer virtual appliances for use in the cloud. However, virtual appliances offer fewer features than physical ones. A virtual appliance often supports less capacity and performance than a comparable physical deduplication appliance. n Virtual deduplication appliances only partially adhere to IaaS design principles . When deploying any application into a hybrid cloud, it should utilize cloud resources and permit programmatic management. These options free organizations to deploy and move them between private and general-purpose clouds as needed. However, deduplication providers often limit the clouds into which organizations may deploy their virtual dedupli cation appliances. They may also restrict and/or specify the cloud resources available to these appliances. These limita tions require organizations to manage virtual deduplication appliances differently from how they manage their other virtualized applications in the hybrid cloud. The challenges of manag ing target-based deduplication appliances in hybrid clouds n Must deploy virtual

necessitate organizations to re examine how they select them. Lifting-and-shifting existing physical or virtual target-based deduplication appliances to the cloud may not work well or even work at all. To identify the right target-based duplica tion appliance they must select one which aligns as closely as possible with hybrid cloud IaaS design principles. Best Practices for Deploying Target based Deduplication Appliances in the Cloud Deploying the right target based deduplication appliance in a hybrid cloud calls for orga nizations to adopt best prac tices to properly select them. These best practices help iden tify target-based deduplication appliances which meet current backup throughput and data deduplication requirements. They also help screen appli ances for ones which better secure data and offer faster recoveries and easier manage ment once deployed. Best Practice #1: Determine if one can deploy the target-based deduplication appliance into any of the private and public clouds which make up a hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud facilitates the deployment and move ment of applications in any cloud which makes up a hybrid cloud. Hybrid clouds encom pass both private and public clouds. This scope dictates any selected target-based dedupli cation appliance should sup port the primary platforms an organization uses in its hybrid cloud. While not an all-encom passing list, target-based dedu plication appliances should support the Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere hypervi sors found in private clouds. For public clouds, the appli ances should support Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Appliances which sup port additional private cloud (KVM, Nutanix, etc.) and public cloud (Alibaba, IBM, etc.) platforms add to their appeal and flexibility. Best Practice #2: Examine the target-based deduplication appliance for how much flexibility its software licensing terms offer. Once deployed in a hybrid cloud, applications may move anywhere and potentially at any time. Organizations may need to move the application to improve its performance. Conversely, they may want or need to move it to reduce expenses. They may also want to move it to another location to meet a specific business demand, such as performing a disaster recovery (DR). To meet these varied use cases, a target-based dedupli cation appliance must offer flexible software licensing terms. The ability to deploy and host the appliance in any cloud may not suffice alone. The software license associ ated with an appliance should remain with it if the appliance

needs to move to another loca tion. If the license does not, organizations may need to obtain a new software license to deploy target-based dedupli cation in another location. The software license should ideally also grant the organiza tions rights to use the software in perpetuity so long as they pay maintenance on it. All software needs routines fixes, patches, and updates. It will also need periodic upgrades. Ideally, the monthly or annual licensing fee will cover all these events. This addresses concerns about organiza tions having to repurchase a “newer” version of the same software. Finally, the software license should not require the use of any specific hardware for it to function. The deduplica tion provider can and certainly should make recommenda tions on the minimum and optimal cloud compute and storage resources for organi zations to use to host the soft ware. However, the software license should not stipulate the type and brand of hardware needed to host the target-based deduplication appliance soft ware. Best Practice #3: Confirm functionality regardless of the private or public cloud into which it gets deployed. Few organizations, if any, want to play guessing games about the features and func tionality a specific application possesses depending on where they deploy it. For instance, the appliance delivers the same features and

DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2023 35