Today is a very exciting day at Veeam, for those who use NetApp ONTAP and/or EMC VNX\VNXe primary storage in their environments. We are announcing further integration to our existing storage integration capabilities by allowing customers to now:
- Use storage snapshots to create complete, isolated copies of your production environment in just a few clicks, for fast and easy testing and troubleshooting—available for VMware vSphere with HP 3PAR\StoreVirtual, NetApp ONTAP, and EMC VNX\VNXe primary storage.
- Perform VMware vSphere backups faster and with reduced impact on your virtual environment by backing up directly from NFS primary storage using Veeam’s proprietary NFS client.
- Completely eliminate the additional impact from backup activities on your production storage by retrieving virtual machine data from NetApp SnapMirror or SnapVault secondary storage systems, instead of from the primary storage system.
Also, earlier on this year (actually about a month ago) we announced EMC VNX\VNXe snapshot integration which will allow Veeam Backup & Replication v9 to now read the snapshots from EMC VNX and VNXe arrays. These can be the snapshots set up via a schedule via the Unisphere or within the Veeam Backup & Replication interface itself. Once Veeam has access to the storage array snapshot, customers can dive in and browse those snapshots and launch these powerful restore options without any agents:
It should be noted that this particular integration is limited to snapshots NFS shares provided by the VNX\VNXe only, yes this means no FC support…………….yet.
Why is this important for your business?
For me personally, this gives me added discussion points when speaking to our global alliance partners and their customers – leveraging storage snapshots is the best way to deliver Availability for the Modern Data Centre and is how I see customers taking their existing RPO\RTO capabilities and really taking them into overdrive to be able to achieve RTPO’s of 5 minutes or better.
Why now?
Storage and Backup used to be treated completely separately, customers had a storage administrator and a backup administrator each with their own agendas and arguably not sharing any synergy between them. We then saw an evolvement where the convergence of Storage and backup technologies were treated separately but very much as a pair of separates (oxymoron?), hardware was being procured that way and it drove behaviour in the customer market to look for synergies to maximise their ROI on each. Enter virtualisation, as well as shared resources and we now have a clear need to treat storage and backup as one. Customers need an availability strategy that touched both storage and backup, and was able to meet the business needs of the company it was serving, and they are demanding more from their infrastructure. Veeam bridges that gap between Storage and Backup and taps into the Storage Infrastructure resources to enable fast, efficient and smart restores for tier one applications. It’s that simple.
All of these features will be available in Veeam Availability Suite v9 onwards due for release later this year.
For our official release on v9 and EMC integration please read http://www.veeam.com/news/new-veeam-availability-suite-v9.html
And for a more in depth article – check out my colleague Luca Dell’Oca’s post here
