During the VeeamON 2020 Technical Session we previewed new features and enhancements across our platform. I posted a quick review covering the platform updates around Backup for AWS, Backup for Microsoft Office 365 and Availability Orchestrator. In that review I touched on the Backup & Replication features and enhancements but didn’t go into any great detail and promised a followup post. While it is too early to go into super detail about the features, I wanted to expand on them a little more as we move into the next phase of the v11 release cycle.
As a refresher, Anton and Michael talked about and demoed the following:
- Continuous Data Protection
- Scale Out Backup Repository Enhancements
- Google Cloud Storage
- Archive Tier and Amazon Glacier/Deep Archive and Azure Blob Archive
- Instant Recovery
- Any Backup to Hyper-V
- NAS Backup as File Share
- MSSQL and Oracle Databases
Continuous Data Protection
CDP is close! I probably don’t have to talk too much about this feature as it’s something I had talked about and presented on a fair bit of the past twelve months. In a nutshell, the ability to drive controllable per second RPOs is something we have been working on for a while now, however I believe the wait will be well worth it. Compared to other CDP solutions already in-market our implementation will offer benefits around scalability, performance and reliability. This is not a feature that can’t be trusted. The work the our R&D team is doing to ensure this means that when it is released, Veeam CDP (based on VAIO) will still be innovative and have clear differentiation to present a clear demarcation between what is in market.
The Tech Field Day 20 Session is still relevant on CDP, but since then we added a pretty cool feature around sizing of existing infrastructure verses selected VM workloads as part of the CDP Policy wizard. Starting right-sized and growing with scale as required is a key component of Veeam CDP. CDP enhances the vision around policy driven end to end data protection for a workload, which now stretches from sub second or minutes RPO, through to Point in Time backup to long term archive all from the same platform.
Scale Out Backup Repository Enhancements
What is known as the Cloud Tier will be paired back from the v11 release as we focus more on features of the Scale Out Backup Repository (SOBR). This started in Update 4 of Backup & Replication 9.5 with the addition of the Capacity Tier and the Move Policy. This continued in v10 with the addition of the Move Policy, Immutability and resiliency and recoverability options. In v11 we are further expanding the concepts behind the Performance and Capacity Tiers by adding the Archive Tier.
The Archive Tier will leverage Amazon Glacier, Glacier Deep Archive and Azure Blob Storage Archive and be configured against the SOBR to effectively offload backups for long term archival storage. The mechanics of the Object Storage platforms where the data will be offloaded to means that the time to first byte for retrieval can take minutes to hours and have varying degrees of cost. This indicates the specific use case for this feature… that is, it is to be seen more as a long term vault replacement. Offloaded restore points are immutable by nature and retrieval of data should only be for emergency use.
The other enhancements was the availability of Google Storage as an Object Storage Repository extent for the Capacity Tier. This was very high on the list of requests for the Capacity Tier and it’s great that we can add another options to the list of Object Storage Repositories in v11.
SOBR is central to our strategy around moving or copying data to Object Storage for cheaper, long term retention. With SOBR we can do things much more efficiently and Innovatively and now is represented across all use cases, all done within Backup & Replication, software driven.
Instant Recovery Features and Enhancements
In v10, we enhanced the underlying mechanics of Instant Recovery to deliver better performance without the need for expensive hardware. Enhanced Instant VM Recovery with the ability to recover from any system to VMware as well as the improvement in parallel operations has meant that we can continue to improve on Instant Recovery in v11. There are three new additions to Instant Recovery in v11.
There is the ability to perform Instant VM Recovery of any workload backed up into a Veeam repository to Hyper-V which matches the v10 feature. Of interest here is the ability to leverage Hyper-V on Windows desktops for this purpose which allows instant restores of any image based backup (Physical and Cloud Agents, VMware, Hyper-V, AHV, AWS and Azure) to a Windows desktop running the Hyper-V role.
Instant NAS Recovery was also announced and shown and will publish a point in time state of a file system and mount as a read-only file share. This can then be accessed via a temporary link. Again, this is all about quick access to a point in time, mounted directly from the backup repository for restore purposes.
Finally we have Instant Database Recovery for MSSQL and Oracle Databases. No one else has approached the instant recovery of databases like this v11 implementation. This will take a point in time state of a database and make it usable in a production system. Much in the same way that Instant VM Recovery works, the idea is to bring back the database as quickly as possible ready for application use, and then migrate it over to production storage when ready. At this stage the switchover process is designed for minimal downtime.
Conclusion
I did forget to mention the macOS Agent that was slipped in at the end of the Technical Session. I think that in it’s self will be a significant feature that has been requested by a lot of people as well. With that, I have briefly expanded on the top line v11 features shown to the world at VeeamON 2020… believe me when I say there is much more to come in terms of v11 news as we get closer to the first Private BETA. Can’t wait to share more about what is coming, but suffice to say… as is normal… our track record of significant major platform releases will continue with v11. Which will be ready when it’s done!
