Over the past few years, Veeam has become the leader in backup for virtual environments offering class-leading consolidated and highly efficient backup and replication that was designed and optimized to handle the special requirements associated with ever-popular virtual machine backups.

Starting with Veeam as a foundation, is it possible to make backup and recovery even simpler? Well, one of the challenges of backup is moving backup data off site for disaster recovery (DR) purposes. You might settle for the manual and rather unreliable process of shipping tapes or media offsite with the hope of getting your data back in a reasonable period of time should a disaster strike. Alternatively, you might build out a disk-to-disk backup infrastructure that extends off site to a secondary or collocation facility, housing additional storage equipment that you own and manage (learn more in my recent article Data Protection and Backup: The Shortcomings of Disk-to-Disk). But perhaps you are looking for a faster, simpler way to achieve your off-site DR objectives, without manual and unreliable processes and without significant capital and administrative investment.

What if you could simply add off-site storage for backups without the need for tapes and without the need for a secondary site? What if at the touch of a button you could access secure off-site cloud storage that is bandwidth optimized with local-key encryption and offers instant recoverability virtually anywhere and a choice of cloud providers. That is TwinStrata CloudArray.

Needless to say, we were recently happy to announce that every copy of Veeam Backup & Replication now comes bundled with a free CloudArray virtual appliance up to 1TB. Backing up virtual server environments just became simpler and the need for tapes and offsite facilities may quickly become a distant memory. Each CloudArray appliance can scale to Petabytes of data with an iSCSI interface that allows seamlessly storing backups or archives. CloudArray also offers additional storage capacity wherever it is needed. If you are a backup administrator considering off-site backup and DR options, consider a better, simpler option that only takes minutes to deploy. Try Veeam with your free CloudArray virtual appliance and let us know how simple off-site backup for your virtual environment can be.

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Let’s take our recent customer case study, where AFGE, the largest federal employee union in the United States, was able to reduce VMWare off-site restore times by 80% versus tape using a combination of CloudArray software and Veeam Backup software.  How exactly should a business value such a substantial operational improvement in off-site backup? Well, here’s how AFGE values it:

“Now that we know the backup data is successfully and securely going offsite, we can rest easily. With the deployment of CloudArray, we were able to cut our storage costs, reduce data recovery times from one week to one day, and eliminate much of the manual work of handling all those tapes resulting in a savings of one quarter of a FTE,” said Taylor Higley, IT director, AFGE.

As you can see, there is a lot to be said about improvements in operational efficiency. While cost savings is always a relevant consideration in moving to the cloud, so is peace of mind in protecting/recovering valuable data.

Find out how your business can benefit from improved IT operational efficiency. Learn more about CloudArray.

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Congratulations to Veeam Software:  Best of Show at VMworld 2010.

.

Veeam Software took 4 separate awards at VMworld 2010, including Best of Show for Veeam Backup and Replication V5.  They also won a Gold Award for vPower, a powerful new technology that  includes Instant VM recovery, Universal Application-Item Recovery, and SureBakup™ recovery verification which automatically verifies the recoverability of every backup .

Veeam has the details on their website (http://www.veeam.com/go/best-of-vmworld-2010/ and http://www.veeam.com/veeam_vpower_datasheet_ds.pdf),   You can also read about it at VMblog, http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/09/07/veeam-wins-best-of-show-at-vmworld.aspx.

Of course, when combined with TwinStrata’s Cloudarray software, Veeam Backup & Replication gives organizations easy access to secure, highly scalable, pay-as-you-go Cloud Storage for their VMware backups (B2D2C).

TwinStrata’s CloudArray is the first purpose-built software solution to enhance data protection at a substantial cost savings compared to traditional off-site storage, delivering simple, affordable, and secure storage solutions to enterprise environments. With this new joint offering from Veeam and TwinStrata, companies using tape systems or disk-to-disk backup for data protection can select CloudArray as the backup target for Veeam Backup & Replication. To ensure data security and privacy, CloudArray  encrypts data prior to transporting it to cloud storage. When combined with Veeam Backup and Replication’s advanced deduplication capabilities, the two products offer a high degree of savings for both bandwidth and end point storage requirements. In addition,  CloudArray Compute-Anywhere allows businesses to restore on-site, offsite, or in the cloud.

You can read about the joint solution at Veeam’s website.  http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup.html#fragment-5, or at one of our Partners, Sublime Solutions (http://blog.sublimesolution.net/VirtuallyPerfectBlog/bid/29769/Veeam-and-TwinStrata-Provide-Cost-effective-Cloud-Storage-for-VMware-Backups/Default.aspx?RewriteStatus=1).

Of course, you can also visit http://www.twinstrata.com/VeeamBackupReplication.html.

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Data Protection is a natural fit for cloud Storage since it affords you a low cost, offsite, service oriented storage model for a function that is critical to your business.

Data Protection isn’t  a complex operation.   It’s the process of ensuring that applications and servers can be restored in the case of a failure or loss of some kind.  Backup is a good example of a typical DP application, but certainly not the only one.  DP is a lot of things, risk reduction, securing your assets, business continuity and disaster restart.

But at its core, DP is about Continuance, Restart, and Recovery; not backup.

Traditionally, backups are spun to tape, and then shipped to offsite storage for safe keeping.    Tape  is well known and understood, but has a lot of drawbacks.

First, it’s a serial media.  You physically have to advance the tape to a specific location to begin to read off data you are looking for, so restore operations can be slow.  That’s assuming the tape is even readable (studies have claimed up to a 40% read error rate)); if either the index or data segment you are looking for is corrupt, you won’t be able to restore the data.

And of course, someone has to find the correct tape at the offsite storage location (remember the Iron Mountain tape losses?) and then ship them back to you.  All of this elongates the recovery process and  increases risk and expense.

A better way – B2D

In more advanced environments, customers will use a backup to disk (B2D) or B2D2T process in place of traditional tape backups.  This has several advantages, first, since the data you want to recover is online, it is extremely easy to find and restore just the data you are looking for.  Secondly, it is far more reliable than tape.   A 1 in 3 or even 1 in 10 chance of not being able to restore the data you need from tape is not a very good metric.

But B2D alone also has disadvantages.  First, it’s a local solution only.  Unless you replicate that disk (very expensive since you need infrastructure in two data centers), you have no offsite copy of your data.  B2D2T is an alternative here, you gain the benefits of short term storage on disk and long term archival offsite, but you are still burdened with the expenses and unreliability associated with tape.

B2D is Good, B2D2C is better

If you could extend your B2D solution to offer low cost, secure, and reliable, offsite storage at the same time, that would be the best of both worlds.  And in fact, B2D combined with CloudArray from TwinStrata enables you to do just that.

With fully cached volumes, you not only have a local copy of your disk based backups, but you gain an automatic offsite copy at your Cloud Storage Provider (public or private).   Of course it’s secure as well.

Even Better, you already have the Backup Software

Chances are, whatever backup product you are currently using to write to tape can be used to write to CloudArray storage volumes (and ultimately to the Cloud).  Almost every major backup application vendor now supports a B2D option in their software, and most will run concurrently with local tape operations.  You may have to upgrade to a later version of their product, but you won’t have to rip and replace your current backup solution.

Adding the Cloud component is easy

To configure the two to work together, all you would need to do is create a local CloudArray volume and mount it to your backup server.  The backup application can then be configured to write to this volume just like it would any local volume, and CloudArray will then copy that data safely to your Cloud Storage Provider.

If a restore becomes necessary, it would be serviced directly from the local cache, and you wouldn’t need to go out to the cloud at all.  Since CloudArray cache is persistent and can be dedicated to specific volumes, there is no risk that your backup data would be flushed out by another more active volume.

In the event of a local site disruption, the Cloud resident backups could be restored to any location of your choice, even a Cloud  Computing environment such as Amazon EC2.

Data Protection is about Recovery.  Reducing risk, and decreasing costs.  It isn’t about doing unnatural acts with Robocopy because that is the only tool that will work with your gateway software.

CloudArray can be used today with leading backup application products such as Net Backup, Backup Exec, Veeam, Visioncore, and a host of others.  Visit www.TwinStrata.com for a free trial.

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Learn more about CloudArray and Veeam working seamlessly together to protect virtual server environments by viewing the following presentation. The presentation also provides a 3 yr TCO for backup and replication of a 5 TB environment. It compares traditional solutions with Cloud storage using CloudArray.

Enjoy.

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