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.
And more importantly, are they protected?
Secure backup is essential for all of our data, and with the rapid increase in data being generated, we all struggle with how to best solve this problem. One of the key elements of a backup strategy is getting copies of your backups offsite. There are so many different options that can be used, but today we’re focusing on Veeam Cloud Connect (VCC) and Veeam Cloud Tier and how 11:11 Systems can help you with the best configuration for protecting your data.
What is Veeam Cloud Connect (VCC)?
VCC provides an independent off-site backup copy to meet the best practice of the 3-2-1 rule for backups. Those customers using VCC for backups will generally have their production data as the first copy, a backup in a local repository as the second copy, and a backup copy job that sends the backup to the cloud via VCC as the third copy. The third copy also provides the second media type and the off-site copy.
A benefit of the VCC backup copy job is that the latest backups can be immediately created in the cloud, so there is no additional gap in recovery point objectives when relying on the cloud copy. The only additional period of time that is needed is to transfer the backup to the provider. In addition, VCC based repositories also have the option of adding WAN accelerators to reduce the impact on your internet bandwidth and Insider Protection to provide air-gapped protection from maliciously deleted backups.
What is cloud tier or capacity tier?
Veeam Cloud Tier allows customers to move older backup files from on-premises repositories to object storage repositories in the cloud. Veeam uses a feature called Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR) to handle the tiering of data from on-premises to the cloud. It is important to note that SOBR requires Veeam Enterprise licensing. This type of solution eases the overhead of managing the capacity of the local storage repository. All the data moved to the capacity tier is removed from the local repository, leaving only metadata that is used to manage the backup as if it were still on-premises. This means that it does not create an additional copy to satisfy 3-2-1 coverage.
11:11 does both. Why?
We often talk with customers that have two similar, but different problems:
- “I want to protect my data following best practices and take advantage of cloud economics.”
- “I have a ton of old backups on disk and/or tape that I’m probably never going to use, but I just can’t delete them.”
11:11 understands the need to address both of these requirements and realizes that in some cases, you may need to use both VCC and cloud tiering as routes to the cloud. The two options that Veeam provides for protecting data into the cloud are not mutually exclusive. Used together, you can achieve 3-2-1 data protection and benefit from the infinite expandability of your local repository into the cloud.
So, remember when comparing VCC to Cloud Tier, it is not that simple
11:11 will help you to understand the advantages of each, while also helping you to realize the benefits of both in order to securely and quickly move all of your data to the cloud.
