Storage Integration is an ever expanding feature set with Veeam. The ability to leverage production storage snapshots offloading performance down from the VMware environment to that storage layer and then give Veeam customers the ability to Backup & Restore from, Orchestrate Application aware consistent snapshots and also leverage those performant and storage efficient snapshots to better leverage that investment.

Universal Storage API

Setup

In terms of setup, in true Veeam fashion its nice and simple to add these new storage arrays to the management server.

We are not only authenticating with the array, we also have the option to define the volumes on the array that have virtual machines residing on them, also the ability to choose which protocols can be used by the storage system and finally which Veeam backup proxies should be used when backing up from the storage arrays.

Veeam Explorers

Veeam have a free feature that allows them to the VMware contents of a storage snapshots even if Veeam didn’t create that snapshot. If they were native storage snapshots and only crash consistent or if a third party tool created application aware snapshots. Veeam has the ability to dive into that snapshot and perform recovery options of those virtual machines, this could be via Instant VM recovery or even down to the application item level recovery amongst more.

Orchestration

With the existing integration of Nimble & NetApp Veeam have the ability to orchestrate application snapshots on their storage arrays that same capability will be present in the IBM/Lenovo and Infinidat storage arrays.

The ability to create a job and define a much tighter RPO by using snapshots as the first port of defence in terms of recovery.

Backup from Storage Snapshots

This is the key for all Veeam storage integrations. Being able to offload down to the storage layer and leverage storage efficient snapshots and then present that volume to a Veeam backup proxy to then start pulling the data, all whilst still maintaining change block tracking from VMware so only having to take or backup the data that you need on a daily basis.

OnDemand Sandbox for Storage Snapshots

Being able to leverage those application consistent storage snapshots for various tasks is a dream come true for a lot of administrators out there. Veeam also has this capability with their SureBackup and SureReplica feature allowing for customers to take those backup files from backup storage and present them to an isolated network for testing and troubleshooting.

The difference with the On-demand sandbox for storage snapshots is that you can now run application consistent snapshots on production, performant and efficient storage but with the automation of the provisioning to VMware as well as the clean up.

I hope this was a useful overview of our latest announcements but also an insight into what we can already do with our existing integrations.