At the moment there upwards of 7000 VCSPs around the world and much like the VMware vCloud Air Network these partners represent a ready made network of like for like platform targets for which customers can extend their onsite Veeam solutions to a VCSP of their choice. (Zettagrid is on of those providers and is Cloud Provider of the Year for the ANZ region) With Veeam 8, Cloud Connect was announced and released and has proven to be a popular service which started picking up significantly in the last half of 2015. With the success of Cloud Connect, which provided a great offsite repository location for clients it was no surprise that Veeam extended this functionality in v9 with Cloud Connect Replication.
Veeam Cloud Connect Replication:
The extended functionality will give service providers the ability to provide clients with RaaS (recovery-as-a-service) in the form of Veeam Cloud Connect Replication for Service Providers. This builds on Cloud Connect which made it easy for existing and new Veeam customers to extend their backup infrastructure to cloud based repositories for offsite backups. Cloud Connect Replication features includes:
- A reserved set of compute and storage for DR with networking resource allocation from a service provider to dramatically simplify setting up replication jobs to the cloud
- Full site failover to a remote DR site from anywhere with just a few clicks through the secure web portal (see pic below), and partial site failover to instantly switch over to selected VM replicas only
- Built-in network extension appliances to simplify networking complexity and preserve communication with, and between, running VMs regardless of physical location
- Failback to an existing or new infrastructure to restore normal business operations
- 1-click failover orchestration for quick failover execution, and site failover testing for failover simulation without disrupting production workloads
- Support for file level recovery from cloud replicas in case there are issues with local backups
- Multiple traffic reduction technologies including built-in WAN acceleration, BitLooker
- Single port connectivity via a secure SSL/TLS connection to a service provider with traffic encryption
Cloud Connect Improvements:
- In addition to being included in the Enterprise Plus edition, this feature is now also included in the Enterprise edition for backup copy and replication jobs to Veeam Cloud Connect service providers
- The ability for users to limit the maximum bandwidth consumption by each tenant on the service provider site to help protect all tenants using the same Cloud Gateway from a “noisy neighbor” problem has been added.
- Switching the logging level for cloud service no longer requires the service to be restarted.
In addition to that Veeam have introduced full support for vCloud Director 8.0 and also have committed to future long term support of vCloud Director in light of the recent VMware announcements. There is a new Per VM Licensing Model to support VCSPs reporting structures and make things easier for reporting and billing of licensing and there is now full support for RESTful API for Service Providers in all product editions with that Per VM license.
While it’s easy to see how awesome Cloud Connect Replication will be for VCSPs to productize and offer true replication based RaaS there are some features that are available in the general v9 Backup & Replication engine that are not available for Cloud Connect just yet:
- Scale Out Repositories
- Per VM Backup File Chain Feature
- vCloud Director Support
Those additional features are on the horizon and in my opinion can’t come soon enough…it will elevate Cloud Connect Replication even further. But overall another great update for the VCSP and I look forward to developing an offering around Cloud Connect Replication as soon as possible to go along with the existing Cloud Connect for Veeam.
References:
http://veeampdf.s3.amazonaws.com/new/veeam_backup_9_0_whats_new_en.pdf
https://www.veeam.com/blog/veeam-availability-suite-v9-is-here.html
