Scalable Backup Storage with Veeam Scale-out Backup Repository

Veeam facilitates the always-on business by providing Recovery Time Object (RTO) and Recovery Point Object (RPO) or RTPO of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data. Cloud based backup ensures that data is highly available, secure through trustworthy encryption methods and replicas of your data spread across multiple areas. The Veeam scale out backup repository is meant to simplify backup job management, improve backup performance and reduce costs on backup storage.

But before we get into the benefits of the scale out backup repository, let’s first develop an understanding of what it is.

What is the Scale out Backup Repository?

Imagine your individual storage devices, now group them up and imagine an abstraction layer over this group; that’s exactly what the scale out backup repository does. Scale out backup repository creates a single virtual pool of backup storage. You can assign backup jobs to this storage and it is also easily scalable. All you have to do is simply add additional storage devices to the existing pool and you can have a backup storage that has no limitations. As a result, you do not have to move you backups to larger size backup repository.

The scale out backup repository can also be understood is that it’s a logical entity. It can be configured in the backup infrastructure. It groups simple backup repositories or extents and makes them into a single pool of storage devices and systems summarizing the total storage capacity. And then to scale it out you just add more storage devices into the pool.

What are the benefits of the Scale out Backup Repository?

There are several benefits of the scalable backup repository; we will be exploring three of the most noticeable ones.

1. Efficient Storage

Thanks to the backup repository, you can utilize all unused storage from virtually any storage device including servers with internal or direct attached storage, filers or deduplication appliances. This means, no space available to you goes to waste, so it leverages your storage investments. It also removes the necessity to match backup jobs to their respective storage targets because all of those chunks of free space, spread throughout your storage devices, can now easily and efficiently be put to use as backup storage. So besides providing the ability to scale up your storage, it also makes sure that the space acquired through your investments is efficiently utilized.

2. Simpler Backup Job Management

Backup job management is more efficient and simpler because of this feature. That’s because backup files can be transparently spread across multiple storage devices within the repository. This removes the need to individually assign and size each backup job to a specific backup repository. So it’s also less time consuming as well. Now you just need to assign the backup job to the scalable backup repository and simply not care about the individual storage device capacity management and job size planning.

Combine this feature with one of Veeam’s features: Per-VM backup file chains, which allows you to create backup files on a per virtual machine (VM) basis instead of a per job basis, you can potentially achieve the simplicity of a single backup job ensuring the availability of your entire production. This means simplified management of potentially thousands of VMs. In context to large enterprises and organizations, this is a huge advantage and a game changer.

3. Improved Backup & Restore Performance

The scale-out backup repository can be used to improve backup and restore performance by configuring it to use the data placement policy. This policy forces full and incremental backups to be stored on different storage devices. This respective placement yields benefits such as vastly improved synthetic full backup creation and transformation performance by allowing these processes to leverage the Input/output (I/O) capacity of multiple storage devices at once.

Another thing that data placement policy does is that it pins incremental backups only to certain high speed storage devices for the fastest backups throughout the work week. Meanwhile, it targets the weekend’s full backups to deduplication appliances for maximum deduplication and storage efficiency therefore leveraging the capabilities of each storage device within the scalable backup repository.

So to summarize the benefits, the feature turns your previously separately managed backup storage devices of all shapes and forms into a single seamless software-defined backup storage system. This system comes with full workload awareness functionality, which makes your backup endeavors much easier and efficient, not to mention cost effectiveness.

Backup and disaster recovery solutions are always undergoing development to make sure that the customer’s experience is enhanced and backup and recovery is made more efficient and reliable.