Veeam Needs a Better Backup Storage Target

To fully realize the benefits of its innovations, Veeam needs a better backup storage target. Veeam Backup and Replication was early to market with change block tracking and instant recovery capabilities. Veeam, version 11, continues to innovate with continuous data protection, advanced ransomware protection and expands instant recovery capabilities to include more workload types.

Veeam’s innovations and the innovations from other backup storage software vendors demand better backup storage targets that can keep pace with the modern backup software’s capabilities, but unfortunately, there has been almost no innovation in backup storage hardware for over 15 years! StorONE’s S1:Backup is the next generation of backup storage targets and is ready for the modern backup software challenge.

Deduplication is not a part of Better Backup Storage

The primary problem with legacy backup storage targets is that they answer the question no one is asking anymore, “how effective is your deduplication?” Deduplication, the feature that built entire companies and even an entire market segment, is now a relic of the past. When deduplication was first introduced, we lived in a world of full and differential backups. Now we have Changed Block Tracking and Block Level Incremental backups. Most backup solutions include replication, and others have continuous data protection. The result is that the amount of redundant data stored on the backup appliance is so small that it isn’t worth the deduplication overhead. You have to question “Does Disk Backup Require Deduplication?”

Why Veeam Backup and Recovery Requires Better Backup Storage

1. Mixed Ingest – Veeam can send data to a backup storage target by various methods. First, it can move data to that storage via a traditional full backup and incremental backup strategy, which means a large sequential IO pattern. More commonly, it can send data to the backup storage target via change block tracked backups. These backups occur more frequently and are semi-sequential. With Veeam 11’s continuous data protection capabilities, the software sends data to the backup target in a random IO stream that matches production IO. Most backup storage targets cannot handle this wide variety of IO patterns.
2. Instant Recovery – Veeam’s instant recovery instantiates a virtual machine’s datastore on the backup storage target. In version 11, Veeam expands the capabilities to include Microsoft SQL, Oracle, and NAS backups. Essentially, you can instantly recover all your workloads. However, instant recovery demands that your backup storage device can assume the role of production storage. That means it must deliver the performance, availability, and data protection of an enterprise-class storage system. The problem is most legacy backup storage targets have single points of failure, weak data availability capabilities, and deliver performance so bad that your users may wish you didn’t instantly recover their applications.
3. Deep Archive – Veeam provides automated backups with retention and life cycle management, automatically moving inactive backup data to a long-term S3 compatible archive. The problem is that archiving data to the cloud for years (or decades) is expensive. You can archive on-premises, but most backup appliances can’t provide both a high-performance front-end backup target and a long-term, cost-effective archive tier, forcing you to have at least two separate storage silos.

StorONE’s S1:Backup Storage Target Delivers Better Backup Storage:

1. Our data-centric design allows you to manage each of the different IO streams without impacting performance. Whatever the best practice is for backing up each of your data center’s environments, StorONE’s S1:Backup’s storage target can handle it. More importantly, our intelligent use of a small flash tier enables us to keep pace with Veeam’s frequently occurring, high-performance backup capabilities, enabling backups to complete even faster than before.
2. S1:Backup is Instant Recovery Ready! – Our backup storage target solution automatically recovers data directly to our intelligent flash tier. S1:Backup can also deliver high performance from only a handful of flash drives, which means that your instantly recovered application is also instantly responsive. StorONE fully protects the instantly recovered VMs and applications with redundant storage controllers and advanced RAID. The result is you can run in the recovered state for weeks while you diagnose what went wrong in production.
3. Cost-Effective – StorONE’s S1:Backup is dramatically less expensive than competing backup solutions, so you can leverage Veeam’s archiving capabilities to cost-effectively and safely archive data via a variety of protocols, including S3. A long-term archive also requires flexibility; you can start with 16TB or 18TB hard disk drives today, then intermix higher capacity drives in the future without repositioning backups and archives.
4. Upfront Pricing – StorONE doesn’t make you play the vendor pricing shell game to figure out how much the solution will cost. We state our best pricing clearly on TRUprice.