Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

Today, I will talk to you about the role of Veeam backup software and OceanStor storage snapshot linkage. Many people may not know much about it. In order to let you know more, Xiaobian summarizes the following contents for you. I hope you can gain something from this article.

In the previous analysis of the 2017 market pattern of storage management software such as backup, archiving, replication and SRM, it is mentioned that the global backup software market pattern in 2017 is as follows:

We see that Veeam is now the fourth largest backup software vendor in the world, and because Veeam focuses on VMware backups, if you look at this market alone, I think Veeam should be ranked very high.

Huawei OceanStor storage is familiar to everyone, ranking first in China and having great influence in the world. It is also a member of Gartner's general storage leader quadrant.

If customers choose Huawei storage and Veeam backup software, what benefits will they get when they combine them?

Not long ago, I saw Veeam launch a plug-in that supports Huawei storage in its official blog, detailing the value of the combination of the two to our common customers. Here are some of the main points of my blog:

Help Huawei OceanStor achieve faster and more efficient backup

Backup operations place a heavy burden on the production storage environment and can degrade performance. Veeam's new integration with Huawei brings agentless Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots to OceanStor storage, increasing backup speeds by 2x and up to 10x faster than competitive backup solutions.

By using VMware block change tracking when reading data that stores snapshots, Veeam minimizes the performance impact of backups on production VMs. And the lifecycle of VMware snapshots has dropped to minutes, compared to hours with VMware-based backups without storage snapshots.

In the standard Veeam backup program, Veeam uses parallel disk backups to shorten the time window, but VMware VM snapshots may still be open for a while as expected. This can result in higher IO when using VMware VM snapshots and can cause VM performance to suffer.

The new integration enables Veeam to create Huawei snapshots directly in the background after virtual machine snapshots are created. The new integration has almost immediate results. In the following example, VMware virtual machine snapshots are opened only before storage snapshots are created, reducing the time required for VMware snapshots to open.

Although performance is affected by multiple variables, Huawei OceanStor customers who use Veeam Availability Storage Snapshot integration typically achieve this level of performance.

Arrange Huawei OceanStor storage snapshots

Veeam integration with OceanStor also includes orchestration capabilities that reduce backup management complexity and increase efficiency. The new Veeam plug-in orchestrates application-consistent storage snapshots without installing any agents in the virtual machine.

In most IT departments, backups are typically scheduled for off-hours so as not to impact performance. However, the current demands on enterprise IT infrastructure make this strategy inappropriate. These days, the boundaries of "off hours" are blurred. Continuous utilization of compute and infrastructure resources is critical to improving return on investment, so it is difficult to find windows with low utilization. More importantly, businesses need to back up more frequently to protect against data loss. Where once a backup per night was sufficient, it is now common service level requirement to continually create recovery points to meet higher recovery point objectives.

Veeam snapshot orchestration helps you meet this need by frequently mixing crash consistent and application consistent snapshots.

Storage Snapshot-based Unlimited Recovery Options

With Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots, you can use Veeam orchestrated or any other existing Huawei storage snapshot to choose the most efficient way to recover entire VMs or individual items from snapshots.

By integrating with Huawei OceanStor storage, Veeam takes recovery flexibility to a whole new level. The new integration enables quick and easy recovery of entire virtual machines, and often helps users easily recover items in virtual machines.

Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots enables IT teams to easily recover individual projects without the time-consuming and resource-intensive conventional VM reconfiguration process. Veeam supports project-level recovery for Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Active Directory, and SharePoint through a simple Windows Explorer-like interface. Veeam supports simple point-and-click operations to extract data, files, emails, etc. from backups and use them in production environments. Veeam also supports recovery of Oracle databases from storage snapshots.

Automated Disaster Recovery/Recovery Validation and DataLabs

The new Huawei plug-in for Veeam also provides an automation solution for one of the biggest pain points and inconsistencies most enterprises face in backup and recovery operations. In fact, most IT backup administrators are not confident of being able to recover from a recovery point in the event of a disaster or data loss.

With Veeam's integration with Huawei, Veeam On-Demand Sandbox for Storage Snapshots automatically creates a fully isolated copy of the production environment, verifies the feasibility of the snapshot scenario, reports the status accordingly, and then unservices the environment. Veeam builds DataLab from recent storage snapshots created by Huawei or other third-party software and runs complete routines to verify VM startup, network connectivity, and application functionality. Once completed, Veeam submits the test results report via email or enhanced reporting in Veeam Availability Suite.

Create Veeam DataLab to address two core requirements of modern IT infrastructure. First, it supports proven recoverability to meet regulatory and operational requirements, not to mention ensuring IT teams can easily implement disaster recovery.

Second, DataLab can effectively meet the needs of development teams, while providing a dedicated lab environment with real-world data to help teams in need develop, upgrade, deploy and test new solutions, and conduct risk assessment and mitigation planning.

Veeam and Huawei OceanStor are a perfect match

Huawei is the latest storage provider to partner with Veeam to improve data management and backup efficiency and speed recovery. Whether you want to accelerate Veeam backups or improve RTPO with storage snapshots beyond actual backups, the newly released Veeam Storage Plug-in for Huawei OceanStor meets your needs and helps you adapt for the future.

After reading the blog content, let me explain the value that Veeam+ Huawei storage snapshot linkage backup brings to customers:

No need to install backup agent on VMware, deployment is simpler. I guess it's because Huawei Storage already has multipath software on VMware. When backup is needed, you can notify vmware through multipath software to coordinate snapshots, ensure application consistency, and track changed data blocks through VMWARE's CBT(change block tracking) function.

2. The backup speed is faster and the impact on production business is small. Because the CBT data blocks that need to be backed up are taken from Huawei storage instead of VMware hosts, the speed is faster, so the vmware snapshot needs to be opened in a very short time, and the impact on production business is minimal. Even snapshot intervals can be changed from hours to minutes if you want.

3. There are more options for recovery. When restoring, you can directly restore snapshots on Huawei storage (the fastest, but the granularity is too coarse), or you can restore a VM, or even an application in a VM.

4. Since the snapshots are stored on Huawei, these snapshots can be used by veeam datalabs, can be used for VM verification, and even used for test/dev, because the snapshot speed is fast enough.

We can see that backup software and storage snapshot linkage are getting hotter and hotter now. Huawei has long supported the linkage between CommVault and Love Data, and now it has added support for Veeam. Other backup software, such as NBU, is also said to be under development. This ecological perfection will definitely bring more value to customers.

After reading the above, do you know more about how Veeam backup software works with OceanStor storage snapshots? If you still want to know more knowledge or related content, please pay attention to the industry information channel, thank you for your support.

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