ONTAP 9.5 went GA a few weeks back, waking up this morning to see the weekly digest from Anton Gostev mentioning the support for ONTAP 9.5 with Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4a. This will not support the new feature released with ONTAP 9.5 synchronous SnapMirror.
I have been preaching the powers of NetApp & Veeam for a few years now, but if you have not seen the power of the integration between the two vendors then I am going to summarise everything in this post here today.
Explorer
Let’s start with the free stuff you can do with Veeam in a NetApp ONTAP environment. Veeam Community Edition (Free version of Veeam) has the ability to add an ONTAP controller to your Veeam environment and regardless of if Veeam has created those native ONTAP snapshots or not, Veeam has the ability to go inside those ONTAP snapshots and perform recoveries against any VMware virtual machine you have within that snapshot. This could be full virtual machine recovery, also Instant VM recovery see here. It could also be file level recovery or if you want to get down to the application items, maybe a mail item or share point object then you can also do this from the FREE version!
Orchestrate
Now natively you can create a NetApp Snapshot pretty stress free, however this is going to be crash consistent and where some application servers would withstand that crash consistency on recovery there are some most likely business critical applications that require application consistency. Why not use Veeam to orchestrate your application aware and application consistent snapshots. This provides a much tighter Recovery Point Objective. This also makes leveraging ONTAP snapshots for these reasons more appealing given that in ONTAP 9.4 the limit of snapshots per volume was increased from 255 to 100. With it being a snapshot your Recovery Time Objective is going to be seconds!
Veeam can also orchestrate the SnapMirror or SnapVault snapshot data transfer.
Backup
Ok sounds good so far. Now the icing on the cake or maybe the buttercream in the middle of the cake. Snapshots are great and I am not getting into the snapshot vs backup its 2019 and if you don’t get it or agree then you probably voted BREXIT and I am fine with that, but this is my time to shine not yours.
The integration with Veeam and NetApp gives us the ability to leverage those snapshots and gain all the benefits mentioned in the above section but also the ability to get those blocks of data into another media type.
OnDemand
We have you covered for granular recovery, fast RTO, tighter RPO and a copy of your data on a separate media type that could protect you from internal malicious threats or corruption. Now the cherry on top.
We can take those ONTAP Snapshots and those backups and we can spin them up in an isolated environment. Veeam DataLabs gives us the ability to leverage the FlexClone technology on the ONTAP system and automate the creation, provisioning and removal of small isolated sandbox environments. This YouTube video clip of a session I did is a little old now, but the capability is a huge feature within Veeam Backup & Replication.
Oh, I should also mention that we have the same integration with Element Software and NetApp HCI I wrote about that here.
I think that’s all for now in the world of NetApp & Veeam. If you have any questions, then you can find me on the twitters @MichaelCade1