For those of you lucky enough to have attended VeeamON in New Orleans, Wednesday you would have heard the announcement for the new Archive Tier. You would have probably also seen both of my demos on the mainstage.

One thing I must note is that the screen shots below are from a pre-alpha build and all options are subject to change.

What is it?

The archive tier that will be one of the many features in Veeam Backup & Replication version 10.

The Archive Tier which is an extension of the scale out backup repository released in v9 allows for automatically moving the oldest backup files from primary backup storage to these archive extents —  backed by less expensive and usually slower storage — based on data retention policy settings, eliminating the need for special requirements or manual intervention

Most the hype around this announcement will be about the ability to now offload those longer-term backups into the likes of Amazon S3 and Glacier as well as Microsoft Azure Blob Storage. But that’s not all!

Veeam will stick to the Storage agnostic approach by enabling the archiving of backups to any target or media including tape, private object storage, and any class or tier of storage that could not previously be used as a Veeam repository based on random I/O characteristics or limitations.

The Archive tier can also play a part in the retention period for our new NAS and File backup feature that was also announced.

Picture1 2

How do we use it?

Depending what storage type you are looking to use for this longer-term archive of backup files depends on your next steps. If you are planning on using on premises disk based or tape based backup solutions which is fine, then add these as your normal backup repositories using the same wizard.

If however you are looking to start pushing your backups to Private Object Storage, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier or Microsoft Azure Blob Storage then firstly you need to create the “containers” on which target you are looking to leverage. For example, if Microsoft Azure Blob Storage is your preferred then you would login to you Azure Portal create a Storage Resource and then create a new Azure Blob container.

Picture2 3

You would then go back to your Veeam management server to add this new Archive repository, under backup infrastructure in Veeam Backup & Replication v10 you will see a new type of repository the “Archive Repository”

Here you can right click and add new and you are greeted with the following options.

Picture3 4

For this short walkthrough, I am going to use that same Microsoft Blob Storage Account.

Picture4 4

Picture5 3

Picture6 2

Now let’s add this new Archive Tier capability to a Scale Out Backup Repository.

You will take your new or existing scale out backup repository and run through the edit, on the page where you select those local extents you will also now see an option to enable to archive tier, as labelled below

Picture7 1

The screen presented is where all the goodness of the archive tier can be configured. This option allows for Veeam customers to move or copy their backup files to any of the available archive extents. This is also where you can select the Archive extents… Yes, this allows for multiple extents within the same Scale-Out Backup Repository.

Picture8

Picture9

The Move option allows for backup files that are older than a custom amount of days to be moved to the archive repository. There is also an override option which allows for a move operation if there was to be space issues on the primary backup storage.

The Copy option is a copy action that as soon as the backup file is created and / or sealed then the files will then be moved to the archive repository. The additional options here allow for specific files to be copy, this could be all files, full backup files only, GFS backup files and a monthly full backup file.

I am really stoked to hear that we are bringing this capability to the Veeam features and functionality, as you have heard and will hear moving forward v10 is a huge release for Veeam and this coupled with the other announcements you can see how huge this is going to be.

I will be back tomorrow to deep dive into the recently announced Storage Integrations.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *