Veeam has been a leader in the private cloud world for a while now, but in its latest release it set its sights on using the public cloud in the same way their customers have. It is also adding support for snapshot-based recovery from VNX and VNXe arrays, as well as agentless redolog backup for Oracle databases. But the jewel in this announcement is clearly the adoption of the public cloud. The combination of this with their new Availability Orchestrator product is truly interesting.
Storage array integration – such as what it did with VNX and VNXe – is a wonderful way to get very fast backups with little impact to the VM, and an ever better way to recover. Although complicated underneath, the concept is simple. Array integration allows Veeam to direct an array to create a volume-level snapshot after it directs VMware to take a VM-level snapshot of all VMs on that volume. Once it takes the volume-level snapshot (which takes only a few seconds), Veeam can direct VMware to release its snapshot. (Since VMware snapshots are very different than other snapshots, as you can see in this blog post, it is crucial to reduce the amount of time a given VMware snapshot stays around.) Since the entire process of creating these snapshots is very quick, this allows Veeam administrators to perform such backups much more frequently – allowing for much tighter RPOs than would otherwise be possible. In addition, using a storage-level snapshot allows for much quicker recovery, lowering RTOs as well.
Veeam is also enhancing its support for Oracle, where it is able to backup Oracle redologs without requiring an agent on the VM. This is great, because redologs are the method it uses to restore an Oracle database to some time later than when it was backed up. Veeam’s agentless backup of these logs throughout the day will allow Veeam customers to have much tighter RPOs than before.
As mentioned before, the truly interesting part of Veeam’s announcement is that Veeam is now working with multiple public cloud providers to be repositories for replicated Veeam backups, allowing it to act as a DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service) provider. Customers replicating Veeam backups into a cloud provider will be able to use that provider as a recovery platform, rather than just as a source to restore backups. VMs whose backups will actually be able to be run from the cloud, rather than just being restored from the cloud. This is a significant enhancement to Veeam functionality.
Veeam also is announcing a new product in Veeam Availability Orchestrator. This allows customers to document and automatically test DR plans across VMware and Hyper-V. Hopefully this tool will support the public cloud as one of the recovery options.
Veeam also recognized that many of its customers are running some or all of their VMs in public cloud providers. This is why they announced that sometime in 2016, they plan to support the backup of both Windows and Linux based VMs running in the cloud.
StorageSwiss Take
Veeam is clearly seeing that many of its customers are moving at least partially to the public cloud, so they need to support backing up any VMs running there. In addition, its supporting leveraging the cloud as a recovery platform, which is one of the best uses for the public cloud. While array and Oracle integration features are interesting, this adoption of the cloud is even more so.
W. Curtis Preston (aka Mr. Backup) is an expert in backup & recovery systems; a space he has been working in since 1993. He has written three books on the subject, Backup & Recovery, Using SANs and NAS, and Unix Backup & Recovery. Mr. Preston is a writer and has spoken at hundreds of seminars and conferences around the world. Preston’s mission is to arm today’s IT managers with truly unbiased information about today’s storage industry and its products.
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