Eircom Limited: oVirt Platform Protection

Who

Eircom Limited, trading as Eir, is a large fixed, mobile, and broadband telecommunications company in Ireland. It remains the largest telecommunications operator in Ireland and has overseas operations focused on the business and corporate telecom markets in the United Kingdom. 

Eir’s vision is to be at the center of one’s digital world – to help you work, play and learn, to connect everyone and everything, from large cities to small villages. Eir is creating new digital experiences in television, home telephones, cell phones, and broadband fiber connections. It is the first Company in Ireland to offer all of these services together. 

Business / Tecnology challenge

The infrastructure that Eir wanted to secure consists of 16 oVirt hosts. Virtual machines run applications crucial for maintaining business continuity of the enterprise: databases, CRM, and other business-critical services. The client decided to base the Company’s IT infrastructure on oVirt because it offers the resiliency and flexibility required by the specific applications hosted on the platform. Moreover, it provides regular releases and has a very active community. Additionally, companies such as Red Hat, Intel, NetApp, Cisco, and IBM are involved in the project, which guarantees the high quality of the solution.  

An open-source infrastructure has many advantages, but securing it is imperative. The customer was looking for a fast and reliable backup solution. For telecommunications services, resource availability is crucial. Most applications need to be available 24/7, and some with 99.99% or higher availability demands. In the event of problems with the availability of services or websites, the Company exposes itself to financial losses and image loss.  

The backups were to be stored on storage arrays via NFS share (NFS servers running VDO for deduplication). In the case of data protection software, we speak of a greenfield deployment. 

Why Storware?

Storware Backup and Recovery offers solid support for oVirt-based environments. It was introduced to this open-source community as the official backup and recovery solution. Furthermore, Storware Backup and Recovery offers a UI integration plugin. With its help, you can manage Storware Backup and Recovery directly from the oVirt administration console. 

Storware Backup and Recovery meets all customers’ expectations regarding RTOs and RPOs. A fast, reliable backup and recovery of virtual machines significantly strengthens a disaster recovery strategy. What’s more, it meets the security requirements for stored data (encryption) and is economical in terms of the use of disk memory (deduplication and compression). 

Storware Backup and Recovery is a solution that supports the latest version of oVirt and successfully uses its functionalities, such as CBT. As a result, it offers as many as five backup strategies: export storage domain (API v3), Proxy VM (snapshot-disk attachment, API v4), snapshot-chains (disk image transfer from hypervisor manager, API v4.2+), SSH transfer, and Changed Block Tracking. CBT in oVirt simplifies, speeds up, and improves robustness by backing up only changed blocks and avoiding temporary snapshots. 

After tests performed on the client’s infrastructure, the CBT backup strategy turned out to be the most effective, running on oVirt 4.4.9. 

The initial implementation was quite quick, just a couple of days between lab and production. However, it took a while to switch to CBT due to the relatively new solution on the oVirt and Storware backup and Recovery side.