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Veeam Enables Dramatically Better RPOs with Backup from Storage Snapshots

Veeam Enables Dramatically Better RPOs with Backup from Storage Snapshots

Veeam® Software, innovative provider of backup, replication and virtualization management solutions for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, today announced that it will enable backup from SAN snapshots supporting HP StoreVirtual Storage and HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage. This new capability is included in Veeam Backup & Replication™ v7, which was also announced today in a companion release. Backup from Storage Snapshots dramatically improves recovery point objectives (RPOs) of VMware backup and significantly reduces the impact of backup activities on the production environment.

Dramatically Better RPO

Storage snapshots are an ideal source of backup because they have no impact on production workloads. However, storage snapshots are not true backups, because if the SAN fails, the snapshots are lost along with the SAN. For true backup, the data must be moved to another storage device. Until now, there have been no convenient, robust tools to perform backup using storage snapshots. Veeam Backup & Replication v7 makes the entire process easy to use, more streamlined and 20 times faster than competitive solutions, creating true backups and replicas from which IT can restore if the SAN has completely melted down.

Developed by and exclusive to Veeam, Backup from Storage Snapshots minimizes the impact on virtual machines (VMs) by enabling a backup job to keep a VM snapshot for only a brief moment, resulting in instant VM snapshot commit. Unlike existing snapshot backup solutions, Veeam leverages VMware changed block tracking (CBT) to reduce backup time dramatically for incremental backups.

Consequently, customers can create backups from storage snapshots up to 20 times faster than with the competition, thanks to VMware CBT, instant datastore mount and other techniques developed by and exclusive to Veeam. As a result, organizations no longer need to rely on daily backups alone for I/O intensive workloads. IT admins can make as many backups and replicas as often as they like, from several times a day to once every 15 minutes, including during business hours (which dramatically improves RPO), with little to no impact to the production environment.

“’Recovery nirvana’ would be a blend of the strengths of backup software (such as centralized management, scheduling and reporting) and the speed, scale and efficiency of platform-based snapshots that are assisted by metadata cues from the application and OS and / or hypervisor,” writes David Russell, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner[1].

The announcement of this new capability builds on last year’s release of Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots, which enables the recovery of VMs and individual items directly from periodic SAN snapshots, allowing for a greatly improved recovery time objective (RTO) for recoveries from SAN snapshots.

“With backup and replication using storage snapshots, IT is no longer limited by the traditional off-hours backup,” said Ratmir Timashev, CEO of Veeam. “Instead, IT can back up three or four times every hour if they desire, ensuring that in the event that some or all of the production environment goes down, little, if any, data will be lost. It’s not a feature we’re selling separately, but will instead be included in Veeam Backup & Replication v7, Modern Data Protection that’s Built for Virtualization.”

“As organizations virtualize more applications and workloads, it becomes increasingly difficult to efficiently manage backup and recovery processes without business disruptions,” said Steve Crimi, Senior Director of Business Development and Alliances, HP. “The combination of HP Converged Storage and Veeam Backup & Replication software accelerates backup and recovery to help customers minimize data loss without sacrificing organization-wide productivity.”

Availability:

Backup from storage snapshots will be included in Veeam Backup & Replication v7, which will be released in Q3 2013.

About Veeam Software

Veeam® Software develops innovative solutions for VMware backup, Hyper-V backup, and virtualization management. Veeam Backup & Replication™ is Modern Data Protection – Built for Virtualization™. Veeam ONE™ is a single solution for real-time monitoring, reporting and capacity planning for VMware, Hyper-V and Veeam Backup & Replication. The Veeam Management Pack™ (MP) and Smart Plug-in™ (SPI) extend enterprise monitoring to VMware through Microsoft System Center and HP Operations Manager. Veeam also provides free virtualization tools. Learn more by visiting http://www.veeam.com/.