The passion of Rick Vanover, senior director of product strategy, Veeam Software, Inc,, for challenges led to his commitment to educate and communicate at all levels – engaging those new to availability technologies as well as those who are experts. As a blogger, podcaster and member of the IT community, he builds relationships and spreads excitement about Veeam’s solutions. Before becoming the go-to guy for firm’s questions, he was in system administration and IT management. His community designations include Microsoft MVP, VMware vExpert and Cisco Champion.
It’s that time again. Time for another storage integration with Veeam Backup & Replication with Dell EMC PowerStore. We’ll be discussing the integration with the Veeam Universal Storage API plug-in and how it provides capabilities that are ready for you.
The toughest workloads are an interesting case when it comes to backup. Some organizations feel the mere task of taking a backup can interfere with the critical application’s performance. This is somewhat counterintuitive as the most critical workloads need the best recovery options when it comes to backups. Organizations can now deliver all-flash data storage appliances that transforms traditional and modern workloads with a data-centric, intelligent, and adaptable infrastructure. Now you can enjoy these backup and recovery options with Veeam.
The storage plug-in with Veeam provides a full set of very versatile backup capabilities, a new recovery option and incredible test capabilities with DataLabs from Dell EMC PowerStore snapshots.
Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots on Dell EMC PowerStore
Let’s start with Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots. This is my favorite part of the Veeam storage plug-in as it gives you a new recovery option that simply isn’t in place with the ease of use. This is shown in the figure below:
The wonderful thing about this capability is that PowerStore snapshots can be used to directly drive file, application and complete VMware VM recovery. This includes Veeam’s namesake high-speed recovery technique, Instant VM Recovery. All of this is done from a low-impact and highly performing storage snapshot on the PowerStore system.
Snapshot-integrated backups on Dell EMC PowerStore
The heart of Veeam is backup, and the heart of the plug-in with Dell EMC PowerStore is the ability to back up from the storage snapshot vs. the VMware snapshot alone.
There is a substantial benefit with Veeam in that that this will be much more performing than just a VMware snapshot used for the backup process. The plug-in allows the data transfer to happen from the storage snapshot for little to no impact at all on the production application.
The differentiator is Veeam’s patented mechanism for storage snapshot-based backups to maintain changed blocked tracking information for the incremental backup. This will keep backup times low and avoid unnecessary snap and scan operations for incremental backups. Take the backup challenge with a Veeam storage plug-in, it’s the difference maker.
Since V11, this also includes the backup capability for physical servers with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows.
Testing, DataLabs and the art of the possible on Dell EMC PowerStore
Got DataLabs? The plug-in with Dell EMC PowerStore will also provide customers with a new opportunity to test and verify behavior without interfering with production applications.
DataLabs, or virtual labs sourced from a snapshot, are Veeam capabilities that were first introduced 11 years ago from backups. These capabilities were expanded to source the lab from replicas and storage snapshots.
This is a way to test an application’s behavior with changes to an application or operating system, updates or securing changes with ease. This is done without interference with the production application on an isolated network.
Download the Dell EMC PowerStore plug-in for Veeam
For Dell EMC PowerStore users, this will be an easy capability to implement in your environment. By the way, even the free Veeam Community Edition will allow the Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots capability to be used. So, should you be plagued with inferior backup, you can at least enjoy this awesome Veeam recovery technique for free. Download the plug-in and read the storage integration documentation.
