ExaGrid and Veeam team up

Recently Veeam and ExaGrid teamed up to create a joint solution that should make the jobs of virtual administrators easier by allowing them to tap into the full capabilities of Veeam without impacting backup performance. Veeam backup and replication brings many advanced data protection and recovery features to virtualized environments but it really was designed to write its backups to a simple disk array not a purpose built disk backup appliance. In fact, customers often find that when using Veeam with some purpose built backup appliances, the features of the two are actually at odds with each other. The purpose of the ExaGrid and Veeam solution is to bring the feature sets into harmony and allow them to be used to their full potential.

Watch the webinar on demand "The five ways your Backup Design can Impact Virtualized Data Protection"

Veeam Ready Integration

To deliver increased functionality in Veeam backup environments, ExaGrid EX2000 appliances and above are now integrated with a Veeam backup agent. By hosting the Veeam agent, ExaGrid appliances provide a direct connection with the Veeam management server that is more optimized than a comparable CIFS or NFS mount point. This connection uses a communication protocol designed for large backup data sets that improves backup and restore speeds. In addition, for certain functions it also relieves many network hops (primary storage – Veeam backup server – backup network – disk appliance). In addition, this agent enables Veeam synthetic full backups to be fully processed on the appliance. In other words, all the Veeam incremental backup jobs can be concatenated on the appliance to provide a full backup image. This eliminates the need to run a secondary process to produce a synthetic full backup image.

Veeam DR Automation

Another benefit of the integration with the Veeam backup agent is that the Veeam management server maintains an “awareness” of any replicated jobs that have been processed by the ExaGrid appliance.

Without this agent, administrators would have to manually update the local and remote Veeam catalogues each time data was electronically vaulted offsite for DR protection. The ExaGrid Veeam agent, however, automates the replica/catalogue update process and as a result, makes the environment DR ready as soon as the replication process completes. Moreover, by offloading the Veeam backup server from processing replication jobs, there is that much less overhead placed on production VMs.

Our detailed product analysis on the Veeam, ExaGrid solution offering is available exclusively to those who register for our on demand webinar, “The Five Ways Your Backup Design Can Impact Virtualized Data Protection”, where Storage Swiss founder George Crump and Kevin Russell, VP of North American Systems Engineering, discuss the challenges when using Veeam and standard disk backup appliances, as well as how techniques like integrating the Veeam agent overcome them. As soon as you sign up, you will be able to download the detailed product analysis from the webinar attachments, which also includes an exclusive copy of our latest whitepaper, “Overcoming Challenges When Integrating Disk Backup Appliances With Veeam”.

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About Colm Keegan

As a 22 year IT veteran, Colm has worked in a variety of capacities ranging from technical support of critical OLTP environments to consultative sales and marketing for system integrators and manufacturers. His focus in the enterprise storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions space extends from mainframe and distributed computing environments across a wide range of industries.