Smart Storage and Modern Data Protection Built for Virtualization Dot Hill Storage Arrays and Veeam Backup & Replication Software offer the winning combination. Veeam and Dot Hill Solutions Introduction 1
INTRODUCTION Virtual server environments place demanding workloads on storage systems. VMware and Hyper-V deployments have become common in many organizations and managing storage is an increasing concern among IT managers who are responsible for those systems. The foundation of an efficient scalable virtualized infrastructure is having the right storage strategy. The storage layer must deliver reliable pools of storage that meet performance demands and integrate with virtualization and data protection solutions, to ensure the business can survive outages and scale painlessly as the company grows. Dot Hill and Veeam offer an integrated backup/replication/recovery solution for virtual server environments that is high performance, high availability, highly scalable and supports both VMware and Hyper-V from a single console. CHALLENGES Organizations with demanding entry-level and mid-range data storage and protection requirements can reduce costs with virtualization, but they must dramatically improve storage performance, increase availability, and simplify storage operations. Virtualization presents some unique storage challenges, including: - Storage growth continues, with storage needs doubling every 18 24 months. - Virtualization causes increased bandwidth demands, network convergence and I/O port consolidation. - Storage management in virtual environments is difficult and time consuming. Scalability can be problematic. Traditional backups run into a host of availability and scalability problems. - There is less room for error. Shorter backup windows and minimal disruption are required for host applications. - Managing OpEx is a challenge with more storage, meaning more requirements for management and support, power, and license fees. Server virtualization drives the need for a higher performance infrastructure, because data access and associated workloads frequently change throughout the day. Storage systems need to operate at the highest performance levels, in order to respond to workloads in real time, adapt to dynamic workloads, and move hot data to achieve the required results. This is why real-time storage tiering has become a requirement for VM environments. Traditional tiering presents challenges. Most providers of tiering solutions attempt to increase performance with batch data migration, performed in the background during low levels of activity, rather than in real-time. The data is typically collected over a 24 hour period, so it doesn t address the hot data requirement when it is typically needed. Veeam and Dot Hill Solutions Introduction 2
STORAGE SOLUTIONS FOR VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS In today s economic climate, server and storage virtualization solutions provide the key to maximizing IT investments, but the benefits extend beyond asset utilization to include: - fast and efficient backup of business-critical data on a continuous basis, with short backup windows and minimal disruption to host applications, - simple provisions for disaster recovery and - seamless data capacity expansion. If you have the following issues, you can benefit from real-time data migration solutions: - Do you experience spikes in hot data needs? - Do you need additional data protection with SRA for use with SRM? - Do your workloads change frequently? - Do you need to drive consolidation of server virtualization environments? - Do you need to max performance through SSD s with minimum budget & resources? - Do your Exchange applications spike with traffic due to cyclical activities? - Do you require high I/O to manage increases in the number of accessed mailboxes? Managing virtualization-centric environments requires a new way of thinking about data storage. Organizations that attempt to manage virtual environments with traditional backups will run into a host of availability and scalability problems. Veeam and Dot Hill provide an optimized and integrated end-to-end storage and data protection solution for virtual environments, including: Multi-Hypervisor Support: Veeam works with VMware and Hyper-V, as does the Dot Hill Array. Enterprise Scalability: Scale storage performance, capacity and backup operations seamlessly. You can add drives up to 150 drives with Dot Hill Arrays and beyond. With Veeam, you simply add more Windows VM Proxies to scale out your backup and replication workloads. Fast recovery: Recovery of VMs in as little as two minutes using Veeam s Instant VM Recovery on Dot Hill storage. Demonstrated 99.999% availability with redundant RAID configurations and dual power supplies. Veeam and Dot Hill Solutions Storage Solutions for Virtual Environments 3
HIGH PERFORMANCE STORAGE FOR DYNAMIC WORKLOADS Dot Hill s AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series is a high-performance, highly available and reliable integrated storage solution that delivers consistently faster access to current data. The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 is a modular storage system with two or three tiers (a high performance SSD tier, a SAS tier, and an archive Nearline SAS tier), proven to organize data according to data access and usage patterns. Dot Hill s AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series offers RealStor Software features with powerful, yet simple, management controls, including: - RealTier: Automatically moves frequently accessed data to faster (SSD) storage tier & less frequently accessed data moves to lower hard drive tier. This occurs in real time (i.e. in seconds), and is an automatic, with fine grain (4 MB) block movement. - RealThin: Thin provisioning only dedicates physical storage to a volume when needed. This will allow users to provision volume sizes of the physical storage independently, so you only have to buy what you need, when you need it. - RealPool: Eliminates low level provisioning and creates pools of storage automatically, configuring disk into a storage pool so you can easily assign volumes to a common pool of storage. - RealQuick: Minimizes exposure time to running with unprotected data and includes a rapid rebuild feature. AUTO-TIERING WITH REALTIER RealTier, a key component of the 5000 Series, allows you to easily implement automated tiered storage that continuously responds to user data demands by moving hot data to an SSD tier. RealTier algorithms continuously and dynamically identify data hot spots, moving them to faster media to increase and leverage the capabilities of SSD drives and high-performance SAS drives. Data analysis and movement happen in real-time, as the system responds minute-by-minute to workload demands, delivering a highly responsive storage infrastructure with the best performance at minimum cost. Faster I/O is achieved in part through real-time, automated data tiering, which prioritizes data files, volumes or blocks between tiered storage, using built-in analysis and data scoring. The most heavily accessed data reside on the SSD-based performance tier, for fastest response time. Commonly used files reside on the SAS tier, and colder data resides on high capacity Nearline SAS drives. Veeam and Dot Hill Solutions High Performance Storage for Dynamic Workloads 4
EFFICIENT BACKUP The following figure illustrates a highly cost effective backup storage solution with Dot Hill s AssuredSAN 3000, managed by Veeam software as the storage target, offering high value, midrange performance and scalability. Dot Hill s AssuredSAN family of disk-to-disk data protection products combines a robust storage capability with enhanced backup and replication software features from Veeam, to address many of today s disaster recovery, business continuity and regulatory compliance requirements. The combined offering is ideal for small to mediumsized organizations and enterprises that are experiencing growing bandwidth demands, driven by network convergence, virtualization and I/O port consolidation trends. When you start out with Veeam in smaller environments, you can use a SAS-connected Dot Hill array for a backup repository, and as you grow, you can add multiple backup servers, across multiple locations, that are managed through a web interface. The figure below illustrates a pyramid of data protection. The Veeam Backup Server at the top of the pyramid can be a Windows VM. While this runs in the Veeam application, the Veeam data console in the Veeam Backup Server commands the three proxy servers in the middle, that do the heavy lifting. Veeam and Dot Hill Solutions Efficient Backup 5
The backup server commands the backup process. The proxies go out to the hypervisor (VMware or vsphere) to take a snapshot of the virtual machine. The backup proxies turn the snapshot of that running virtual machine into a compressed deduplicated file, which then gets written across the network to the Dot Hill Backup Repository on right side. The configuration scales with backup servers. The backup servers control proxies, so as you add more VMs, or if you want to shorten the backup window, you simply add more backup proxy servers. The joint Dot Hill Veeam solution provides greater data access speed for virtual server environments, near line backup, and the ability to replicate VMs and snapshots offsite for easy, affordable disaster recovery. Veeam Version 6.5 now with support for vsphere 5.1 and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Veeam and Dot Hill Solutions Efficient Backup 6
Veeam vpower Technology: vpower is fairly simple in concept. Veeam recovers VMs directly from their compressed deduplicated backup images, which are written to a disk repository during the backup process. From that image on disk, you start up the virtual machine, and publish the contents back to the production host via an NFS data store. Veeam Backup and Replication has a feature called SureBackup, that uses vpower technology to start up a virtual machine from its backup file and put it in an isolated network, all done automatically. SureBackup tests the recoverability of every backup every night. The backup process creates a compressed deduplicated backup image that lives on a backup disk in a repository. You use the Veeam console to recover the virtual machine from the backup image. A strong Disaster Recovery Plan can be set up using off-site VMware or Hyper-V hosts with Veeam VMlevel replicationand Dot Hill s Pro5000 for primary storage. The figure below illustrates is a typical replication/disaster recovery environment that is supported today. Replication is conceptually similar to backup, but has a different outcome. With replication you take a copy of a running virtual machine with a hypervisor snapshot capability, and read the snapshot of the virtual machine. With replication you compress the copy of the files, send a copy of the compressed files across a network link (typically a WAN link over an IP network) with a proxy waiting on the other side, which decompresses the copy of the VM files. It then registers that virtual machine (copy of files) with a hypervisor host on the DR side. If you need to recover that virtual machine or start it up, you Veeam and Dot Hill Solutions Efficient Backup 7
would use a tool like vcenter or Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager on the DR side, to bring a copy of that virtual machine up. This is a copy of a virtual machine, a replica, rather than a backup image. Dot Hill complements Veeam technology for storage replication. Veeam s replication occurs at the VMlevel. With Veeam s VM-level replication, you are replicating and failing over VMs, rather than an entire site. Replication protects against system-wide failures and allows data to be accessed at a moment s notice, with minimal human intervention. The tiering software in Dot Hill s Pro5000 makes it ideal for virtual environments and it allows for changes in performance in the primary and secondary site, as needed. The solution is certified by both Dot Hill and Veeam and can deliver performance at around $3 per IOP. RECOVERY Many vendors offer backup solutions, but recovery is where Veeam sets itself apart from the competition. Backup is important, but recovery keeps you employed. Veeam s Instant VM Recovery will recover VMs in as little as two minutes. The amount of time it takes to restore a virtual machine is directly tied to the performance of the underlying disk repository or storage platform. So if you have fast disk backup storage for a repository, you will be able to recover the virtual machine or its files or Exchange messages very quickly as well. You can restore the entire virtual machine to the original host or to an alternate host, or you can restore guest files from the image-level backup with Instant File-Level Recovery (IFLR). Nine out of ten times, when someone calls to initiate a recovery scenario, they are looking for a file, Exchange Message or Exchange Meeting, but usually it is a single object that someone needs to have recovered. Application Veeam and Dot Hill Solutions Recovery 8
items can be recovered with the Veeam Universal Application-Item Recovery (U-AIR), and Exchange items can be recovered directly from backup with Veeam Explorer for Exchange. The combined Veeam-Dot Hill solution provides a cost-effective disk-based backup solution that maximizes data reduction and scales to meet the needs of demanding environments, ranging from SMB to enterprise. Other features of the combined solution include: High Performance Storage: High speed interfaces with real-time data tiering technology ensures very fast write operations High Availability: Demonstrated 99.999% availability with redundant RAID configurations and dual power supplies Integrated replication: Array to array replication, dramatically simplifying disaster recovery Multi-hypervisor support: Manages both Hyper-V & VMware from a single console and license Enterprise scalability: Better performance and simplified deployment for any size environment About Dot Hill: Offering high performance and industry-leading uptime, Dot Hill's RAID technology is the foundation for best-in-class storage solutions, offering enterprise-class security, availability and data protection. With over 500,000 systems installed, Dot Hill s AssuredSAN Storage Solutions deliver breakthrough storage performance, efficiency, flexibility and scalability with demonstrated 99.999% availability, through redundant RAID configurations and dual power supplies. Dot Hill offers networked disk RAID storage solutions with a choice of iscsi, Fibre Channel or SAS host connectivity, delivering flexibility and maximization of existing network infrastructures. Entry level solutions scale seamlessly for more performance or capacity with complete re-use of existing disk drive expansion trays for unrivalled investment protection. About Veeam: Veeam Software develops innovative solutions for VMware backup, Hyper-V backup, and virtualization management. Veeam Backup & Replication is the #1 VM Backup solution. Veeam ONE is a single solution for real-time monitoring, resource optimization and management reporting for VMware and Hyper-V. 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/. 2013 Copyright Dot Hill Systems Corporation. All rights reserved. Dot Hill Systems Corp., Dot Hill, the DotHill logo, AssuredSAN, AssuredRemote, RealStor, RealTier, RealSize, and RealPool are trademarks or registered trademarks of Dot Hill Systems. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies in the United States and/or other countries. 4.17.13 Veeam and Dot Hill Solutions Recovery 9