SOLUTION BRIEF
Veeam Backup & Replication + vCloud Air
Offsite backup for private, public and hybrid
cloud architectures
The promise
of the cloud
The promise of unlimited capacity,
lower operating costs, and managed
infrastructure offered by the cloud
must be weighed against performance,
governance, and security considerations.
As the marketplace for service providers
continues to grow, organizations have
many choices for on-demand, pay-asyou-go cloud services for computing,
storage infrastructure, and platform
services. Public storage clouds offer
reliability without the cost, complexity,
and logistical planning associated with
last-generation technology. Another
benefit is that the public cloud provides a
modern approach to the “3-2-1 rule” * for
storing backups while lowering costs and
lessening dependence on tape.
*The 3-2-1 rule states customers should
maintain three copies of data on two
different media with at least one copy
stored in a remote location.
The Changing Business Environment
Today’s business is an always-on business. Businesses today require 24/7 access to
data, efficient management of exploding data, and little tolerance for downtime
and data loss. Complicating matters is the need to get data safely off-site. Storing
backups to tape offers one strategy but this method can be costly and does not offer
the reliability of other methods.
The implications of always-on, zero-downtime environments extend beyond that of
backup and recovery challenges as IT consumption and the associated capital costs
continue to grow. To address these challenges, virtualization, cloud, and storage
technologies have evolved and improved to include converged infrastructure and
software-defined features. Even so, the vast majority of businesses will continue to
face issues such as data loss, slow recovery times, and lack of visibility by settling for
lower-performing, legacy backup solutions.
vCloud Air
VMware vCloud® Air™ is a public cloud platform offering infrastructure, disaster
recovery, and various applications as service offerings built on vSphere. vCloud
Air allows organizations to extend their workloads into the cloud by migrating
existing, on-site virtual machines (VMs) to the public cloud or starting up new
application VMs directly in the cloud. Today, vCloud Air supports more than
5,000 applications and 90 operating systems, making it a viable choice for
organizations intent on leveraging public- or hybrid-cloud architectures.
Veeam Backup & Replication
Veeam® Backup & Replication™ provides fast, flexible, and reliable recovery of
virtualized applications and data. It unifies backup and replication in a single
solution, increases the value of backup and reinvents data protection for VMware
vSphere® and Microsoft Hyper-V® virtual environments. Built specifically for
virtual environments, Veeam Backup & Replication operates at the virtualization
layer and uses an image-based approach for VM backup. To retrieve VM data,
no agent software needs to be installed inside the guest OS. Instead, Veeam
Backup & Replication leverages ESX snapshot capabilities to create a compressed,
deduplicated backup file. All backup files created by the job are located in a
dedicated job folder on a backup repository. The flexibility in placement of the
backup repository makes maintaining backups in the cloud simple and affordable.
How Veeam Backup & Replication Helps Your Journey to the Cloud
To back up VMs, organizations can use one of two available methods:
incremental backup or reversed incremental backup. Regardless of the method
used, the first run of a job creates a full backup of VM image. Subsequent
job runs are incremental—Veeam Backup & Replication copies only those
data blocks that have changed since the last backup job run. To keep track of
changed data blocks, Veeam Backup & Replication uses different approaches,
including VMware’s Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology.
SOLUTION BRIEF
Better Together
VMware vCloud Air together with Veeam
Backup & Replication allows organizations
to easily and confidently copy local
backups to the cloud with the ability
to compress, deduplicate, and encrypt
backups to reduce storage costs and
bandwidth usage. Veeam and VMware
Cloud storage together solves the issue of
keeping backups off site and safe from a
regional disaster event, reducing the risk
of losing critical business data.
It is this unique architecture that allows organizations to copy Veeam backups offsite,
including cloud storage. A backup repository is a location used by Veeam Backup
& Replication jobs to store backup files, copies of VMs and metadata for replicated
VMs. Technically, a backup repository is a folder on the backup storage. By assigning
different repositories to jobs and limiting the number of parallel jobs for each one,
you can balance the load across your backup infrastructure.
In the Veeam backup infrastructure, you can use one of the following
repository types:
•
Windows server with local or direct-attached storage: The storage can
be a local disk, directly attached disk-based storage (such as a USB hard
drive), or iSCSI/fibre channel SAN LUN in case the server is connected to
the SAN fabric.
•
Linux server with local, direct-attached storage or mounted NFS: The
storage can be a local disk, disk-based storage (such as a USB hard drive),
NFS share, or iSCSI/fibre channel SAN LUN in case the server is connected
into the SAN fabric.
•
CIFS (SMB) share: SMB share does not support Veeam transport services,
therefore data to the SMB share is written from a Windows-based proxy
server. By default, this role performs a backup proxy that is utilized by the job
for data transport.
Customer On-Premises Infrastructure
NEW!
SSL
VMware/Hyper-V
Backup
Production
Storage
Backup copy
Primary
Backup Storage
WAN Acceleration
Cloud NEW!
Gateway
Cloud NEW!
Repository
(optional)
Figure 1: Veeam allows off-site copies of the backup to be hosted in vCloud Air.
About Veeam
Veeam® enables the Always-On Business™ by providing solutions that deliver
Availability for the Modern Data Center™. Veeam recognizes the challenges
in keeping a business up and running at all times and addresses them with
solutions that provide high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified
protection, leveraged data and complete visibility. More than 135,000
customers worldwide, including 70% of the Fortune 500, count on Veeam
to protect 7.9+ million VMs.
© 2015 Veeam Software. All rights reserved.
All trademarks are the property of their
respective owners.
02162015