Editor’s Note: As of January 2022, iland is now 11:11 Systems, a managed infrastructure solutions provider at the forefront of cloud, connectivity, and security. As a legacy iland.com blog post, this article likely contains information that is no longer relevant. For the most up-to-date product information and resources, or if you have further questions, please refer to the 11:11 Systems Success Center or contact us directly.
Veeam is an amazing company to partner with when building services for our joint customers. With a strong focus on providing a robust data protection product, and an equally strong focus on enabling service providers, Veeam makes it easy to provide their solutions. 11:11’s customers are able to create very easy remote cloud backups to augment their local backups and help them achieve the golden 3-2-1 backup rule. With the release of Update 4 for Veeam Availability Suite 9.5, Veeam is introducing yet another way 11:11 can help protect customer’s on-premises data.
New in this update is the ability to extend a customer’s local Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR) with a cloud tier that utilizes S3-compatible storage, like 11:11’s Secure Cloud Object Storage. SOBR allows Veeam customers to easily scale their backup repository by combining multiple disparate storage together into a single repository. This gives customers the ability to easily scale their backup capacity without having to reconfigure their backup jobs. A cloud tier can now be added to an on-premises SOBR to extend the repository infinitely, easing the cost of long-term retention and simplifying the burden of tracking and maintaining local storage capacity.
Adding 11:11’s object storage is as simple as adding a new storage repository to a SOBR – which can start with a single local disk. Customers can also define when backups will be moved off to the cloud storage based on the age of the backup or the utilization of the SOBR. By utilizing the age-based option, customers can effectively move off older backups to this cheaper tier of storage when these points in time become unlikely to be utilized. When moving backups to the cloud tier, Veeam utilizes deduplication to make the transfer and storage very efficient. Metadata about the backups is maintained locally, so discovering the data is quick. Local caching based on block indexing and metadata means customers are able to quickly retrieve individual files from the cloud without a lot of unnecessary data transfer. This makes this new SOBR functionality a great way to extend the life of backup data to meet compliance purposes without breaking the budget.
Customers can also configure the cloud tier to take over if the SOBR becomes a defined percentage utilized (example: 90 percent full). In this situation, Veeam will move the oldest point in time out to the object store, even if it hasn’t hit the configured age yet. This ensures that backup jobs will not fail simply because of capacity overutilization since the object storage essentially provides an infinite “spill-over” capacity for a customer’s on-premises SOBR.
Customers should not view this as a replacement to backup copy jobs that utilize Veeam Cloud Connect repositories. Extending a SOBR to the cloud is designed for long-term storage of data that won’t often, if ever, be used. Cloud Connect repositories, like 11:11’s Cloud Backup, are designed to be more readily accessible on higher-end storage. Backups that move into the cloud tier are actually moved, not copied, to the cloud, and therefore will not satisfy the 3-2-1 rules need for additional copies. In fact, cloud tier and Cloud Connect backups are designed to work together for a complete backup solution that minimizes the costs of long-term backup retention while reducing the risks of ever-growing local storage.
11:11 works very closely with Veeam to ensure full functionality of our joint products so we can deliver customers a complete data protection solution. It’s one of the reasons we were awarded the 2018 Veeam Innovation Award. Consequently, we have already completed thorough testing of the 11:11 Cloud Object Storage as a cloud tier solution through multiple months of beta and RTM testing. But, 11:11’s goal of making the customer’s experience as successful as possible doesn’t stop there. Simplified pricing is a top goal for all 11:11 products, so customers can expect to only pay for the reserved capacity they need with no additional fees for bandwidth or processing of the data. So, there will be no fear of unexpected charges due to an unusually high rate of data transfer in or out of the cloud tier. The management is also simplified, especially for customers already utilizing 11:11 Cloud Backups, since it is managed through the 11:11 Cloud Console, along with any backups, Infrastructure as a Service, and Disaster Recovery as a Service products they are utilizing. As implied by the product names, security is also one of the core design goals of all 11:11 products, so customers can feel assured their data is safe through mandatory encrypted connections and data encrypted on disk.
With all of these additional features, along with top-notch customer service and the solution flexibility to fit most customer needs, 11:11 is able to provide a very robust data protection solution to Veeam customers worldwide. The addition of cloud tier functionality within a SOBR gives customers even more flexibility for ensuring their data is protected from disaster. Learn more about Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 U4 and 11:11 Cloud Object Storage.
