Using Veeam Cloud Connect to Back Up Your On-Premises VMware Workloads to the Cloud

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1 W H I T E P A P E R DELIVERING IT PEACE OF MIND SM Using Veeam Cloud Connect to Back Up Your On-Premises VMware Workloads to the Cloud

2 Using Veeam Cloud Connect to Back Up Your On-Premises VMware Workloads to the Cloud Backing up data has always been a problem for IT departments. Backup software products have historically lacked scalability and reliability, and have been particularly deficient when it comes to data recovery. Despite the continuing evolution of these products, attaining acceptable backup performance in the enterprise of today is a greater challenge for IT than ever, due to the exponential growth of data and demands for faster restore and recovery times. On top of that, it s now quite common for companies to require their key applications and data center to be available 24/7. Now, add the task of backing up virtual servers to the mix. With so many enterprises running VMware virtualization in-house, backing up on-premises VMware workloads is the latest hitch for backup administrators. No wonder backup is what keeps so many IT managers awake at night. Data protection software: the must-have layer Savvy IT managers now use comprehensive data protection software solutions to take care of their day-to-day backups and, as an added precaution, replicate and test their backups in order to ensure efficiency and consistency. The latest generation of data protection software has become a must-have layer in today s data center infrastructure because it integrates three essential technologies: virtualization, storage and the cloud. Yet even the best data protection software isn t always enough. Many IT managers take the further precaution of moving their backups offsite. Storing their company s data at a second physical location provides insurance against a disaster and brings them peace of mind. One such strategy is to send backup tapes to a remote location; however, tape has its limitations, and getting backups offsite can be a challenge due to exploding data volumes and limited IT bandwidth. Another is to build or maintain an offsite location, but many companies lack the resources to do this, and acquiring space and storage at an offsite can be prohibitively expensive. Even if budget is not a roadblock, the complexity of providing and setting up connectivity, networking and routing can be a deal-breaker. Role of the cloud All this is why more and more companies, large and small, are looking to the cloud to play a role in their backup strategies. Connecting to a dedicated repository in the cloud for backup protects against the risk of catastrophic data loss without owning, managing and maintaining hardware at a second site. And because the cloud s economic model is one of pay-as-you-go scalability, a company can increase the size of that dedicated offsite repository as needed. Whether a company employs a public or private cloud for backup, they will likely use a backup job to store data on-premises for fast local restores, then use a backup copy job to send data offsite to the cloud provider s repository. Companies that employ this offsite backup strategy are adhering to what is known as the rule for ensuring data availability in the event of a disaster. The rule provides guidance by answering two critical questions: how many backup files should a company have, and where should it store them. Veeam Cloud Connect Exponential growth of data. The need for 24/7 availability. Recovery. Growing VMware workloads. Cloud backup. The rule. These are reasons that IT professionals are turning to solutions from Veeam Software, an industry-leading developer of data protection solutions specifically for virtualized infrastructures and the cloud. The company s backup and disaster recovery suites are rapidly taking market share from the leading players in the market, and the latest (version 8) releases of Veeam s software suites include new cloud backup functionality called Veeam Cloud Connect. Veeam Cloud Connect gives IT departments a fully integrated, fast and efficient means to move their backups to a cloud repository without having to make a capital investment in offsite infrastructure or dealing with the complexity of managing it. The cloud backup repository is managed by a Veeam service provider partner, one that the customers themselves can choose. The customer simply goes into their Veeam console to select their Veeam cloud provider, and, after some initial setup work, they can start sending virtual workloads to that provider s cloud repository. 1

3 Veeam Cloud Connect and the Rule The backup rule calls for three copies of data to exist on two different kinds of media, one of which is offsite. Here s how Veeam Cloud Connect helps companies meet the rule s requirement for offsite backup. Have at least three copies of data: Veeam Cloud Connect enables an administrator to set up backup jobs to create several backups for each VMware virtual machine (VM) in the company. Store the copies on two different media: Veeam is storageagnostic it supports tapes, disks, the cloud and more. You can store your backups to any of the listed media. Keep one backup copy offsite: Veeam Cloud Connect allows you to store your backups to the cloud. For companies that back up their VMware environments with Veeam Cloud Connect, the backup rule becomes the rule, where 0 means zero errors during the automatic recoverability verification of every VM backup. Business Benefits of Veeam Cloud Connect The key business and IT benefits of Veeam Cloud Connect include: Ease of use Restore time objectives in minutes, not hours or days Virtual machine recovery Faster backup operations End-to-end security features Automated monitoring and reporting Ease of use: Veeam Cloud Connect gives users a fast and encrypted means to move backups to an offsite backup repository without investing in offsite infrastructure or dealing with the complexity of managing it. And it s simple to deploy. The customer chooses a service provider offering Veeam Cloud Connect from within the Veeam backup console based on their desired criteria. Once the subscription to the provider s services begins, the customer merely points their backups to the provider s hosted backup repository. Veeam Cloud Connect also eliminates the two hurdles that backing up to the cloud previously required: setting up VPN tunnels and the need for dedicated repositories. VPNs are complex to set up, and typically require the service provider and the customer (the source and the target) to both be sitting at their firewalls running the same type of security layer. With Veeam Cloud Connect, the connection occurs directly over the Internet, using the Veeam component known as the Cloud Gateway, which is responsible for the encapsulation of all the backup traffic inside the SSL tunnel. This SSL connection enables backup administrators to quickly send encrypted backups to the cloud repository. Veeam Cloud Connect eliminates the need for dedicated backup repositories through Veeam s Cloud Repository component. With the Cloud Repository, an abstraction layer is created over an existing backup repository, so that multiple customers can store their backups inside a logically isolated, multi-tenant repository, with the same level of confidentiality they d get with a dedicated repository. Restore/recovery: Backup is nothing without recovery. Veeam Cloud Connect not only enables a VMware administrator to get backups to the cloud, but also provides the ability to recover from the cloud. In fact, users can recover from a local failure directly from the cloud repository. Overview of the process and architecture for Cloud Backup for Veeam: Graphic 2014 Veeam Software 2

4 With other forms of cloud backup, backup files are simply copied or synced to cloud storage. You can get the backup to the cloud, but when it s time to recover the data, you have to retrieve and then download the entire backup file. With Veeam Cloud Connect, you don t need to download a backup file, import it, and then do a restore a series of steps that could take hours, or even days. Instead, your backup administrator can, from their console, browse and restore entire VMs, parts of VMs or individual items such as guest files, directly from their cloud backup. Veeam also provides assistance for the rapid recovery of VMs. Its Instant VM Recovery feature allows a VMware administrator to run any virtualized application on VMware vsphere directly from the latest backup. The IT team, rather than making users wait while they provision storage, can extract the backup and copy it to production, simply by starting a VM with Veeam s vpower technology. After that, IT can use a VM disk file migration feature, such as VMware Storage vmotion or Veeam s Quick Migration, to move the VM back to production storage. All in all, the customer can recover a failed VM in less than two minutes. Faster backup copy operations: Offsite backup and replication involves moving large volumes of data between sites. Veeam s built-in WAN Accelerator helps optimize data transfer over the WAN (you will want to check with your service provider or Veeam for availability), thereby allowing customers to speed up their backup copy and replication operations. Utilizing this new feature function, they can get backups offsite to remote storage up to 50 times faster than a regular backup file copy. Security: With Veeam Cloud Connect, backups are encrypted at the source, in transit and at rest. The final result is end-to-end encryption, from on-premises to the cloud repository, with no negative impact on WAN acceleration and compression. Even if a password is lost, data can still be recovered from the encrypted backups without compromising security. Automated monitoring and reporting: The automated monitoring and reporting tools in Veeam Cloud Connect give backup administrators full visibility and control of the backup infrastructure. They can monitor the health of their VMware environments, troubleshoot performance, and plan all their backup as well as replication tasks. They can report on unprotected VMs (VMs that have outdated or missing backup), control the status of repositories and proxy repositories, and analyze capacity trends to stay on top of potential storage space issues. From the backup console they can access and recover data in hosted backup repositories, track cloud repository consumption and receive reminders for hosted storage renewals. All these key metrics are visible from within a company s existing management framework. Finding the right cloud provider/partner A company can find a Veeam Cloud Provider simply by going into the console and checking off its desired criteria. But what should those parameters be? Needless to say, you will want a service provider with substantial cloud experience, a company that the customer knows can be trusted with their data and will keep their data safe, backed up and always available. You will also want a service provider that: Is large enough to support enterprise customers but small enough to provide an emphasis on the small and medium-sized business. Can support your backup solution. Can understand your business at a high level, from professional services consultations to full management. Can complement your company s onsite IT team and work with the CIO to free up their cycles, so they can concentrate on the strategy of running their business. Has multiple, geographically diverse network operation centers. Operates its data centers under SSAE 16 audits (SOC2), which provide an independent assessment of the design and efficiency of the service provider s operations. Finally, you will want a service provider with VMware expertise and VMware-certified technicians who can help you deploy VMware and resolve any issues with backing up your on-premises VMware workloads. With larger numbers of production applications being run in virtualized environments, the need to protect the VMs running these applications against data loss grows accordingly. For any company that decides that the time is right to back up their on-premises VMware workloads to the cloud, finding the right cloud provider partner is mandatory. Veeam Cloud Connect is the tool for helping you find that partner. 3

5 About mindshift Cloud Backup for Veeam mindshift provides a fully integrated, fast and encrypted disaster recovery solution for Veeam customers to back up and restore from the cloud. It allows you to back up VMware environments offsite, without the cost and complexity of managing an offsite infrastructure. Learn more at About mindshift Technologies, Inc. mindshift, a Ricoh company, is one of the largest IT outsourcing and cloud services providers, serving small and mid-size businesses for 15 years. At mindshift, we re about keeping your IT systems up and running, providing personal attention and making you more productive. We re big enough to offer the facilities, services and expertise you expect, but small enough to provide the support and attention you demand. Learn more at We Deliver IT Peace of Mind. That Means: Guaranteed uptime Unparalleled customer support Always-available IT expertise The benefits of an enterprise-class data center A Customer Advocate mindshift Facts at a Glance: 50,000+ managed desktops 13,000+ managed servers and devices 6.8 billion s/year 2.8 PB of storage Geographically diverse data centers mindshift and the mindshift Technologies logo are registered service marks, and Delivering IT Peace of Mind is a service mark of mindshift Technologies, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. Copyright 2015 mindshift Technologies, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Ricoh Americas Corp. All rights reserved. Rev. 3/15 4