<p>Virtualizedserver infrastructure has benefited from two recent advancements. First, the integration offlash is allowing primarystorage to respond better to the random I/O nature characteristic of virtualized environments.Second, many backupapplications can now recover and launch a failed VM directly off of a disk-basedbackup appliance. While seemingly unrelated, these two benefits are in conflict with eachother.</p><p>Because of flash, users of virtualmachines have become accustomed to rapid storage performance. If they are forced to run theirvirtualized application directly from a backup appliance, however, they will notice significantperformance degradation since these systems don't use flash. Worse still, the back end of theseappliances don't even use high-performance hard drives. Instead, they typically use slow,high-capacity HDDs inorder to make the economics of disk backup viable.Caching</p><p>In addition, many application vendors have started coding their applications to take advantageof the near memory-like speeds available through these resources. In short, once businessapplications have been accelerated through the use of SSD, there really is nogoing back. From a user perspective, the performance difference between going from an applicationbeing serviced by SSD resources to an application being run from conventional disk will be totallyunacceptable.</p><p>As a result, data centers now have an interesting dilemma -- run VMs on storage that providespoor performance or endure slower VM recoveries back to the flash-assisted primary storage arraywhere performance is blazing fast. The question is, what is more valuable? A VM may be able to berapidly recovered off the backup storage system, but if performance is so slow that it'sessentially unusable, then what's the point? On the other hand, uptime service-level agreements oncritical business applications may not tolerate the downtime required to rebuild a failed VM backto the production storage environment.Booting from backup cache</p><p><a href="http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/tip/Are-disk-to-disk-backup-solutions-too-slow-for-modern-recovery">Keep reading...</a></p>