“You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.” — Daniel Keys Moran

I am lucky and grateful to be one of the new members of the NetApp A-Team (@NetAppATeam), selected late last year.  One of the perks is having the opportunity to listen to NetApp exclusive 3^rd party vendor/partner talks, such as Veeam.  Today fellow NetApp A-Team member Adam Bergh (@ajbergh), Global Alliance Architect for NetApp Solutions for Veeam, gave an excellent talk on the new upcoming Veeam V10 NAS Backup Solution.  The product is available as RC1 today and will GA next month, February 18, 2020.

Some of the new Veeam v10 enhanced NAS Back Solution for enterprise customers features and capabilities are:

1. Performance in processing petabytes of unstructured data
2. Scalable Components with fast-incremental file-level backups
3. Outstanding data consistency at a lower price to reduce cost

High-Level Overview of Veeam V10 NAS Backup

A data protection backup solution that is optimized to provide performance by providing massive parallel processing and includes a new backup format designed for NAS workloads and can scale to billions of files and petabytes of data with data compression.

Supported Sources:

• SMB versions 1, 2, and 3
• NFS Version 3 and 4.1
• Windows File Servers
• Linux File Servers

The following diagram is a snapshot taken from today’s meeting and provides a high-level overview of the components.

*Copyright 2019 Veeam Software

This solution components work with NetApp ONTAP or other sources utilizing Advance Transports Modes to:

• Backup directly from a file share
• Backup from VSS Snapshots on the file proxy
• Backup from a Native Storage Snapshot

The fast Cache Repository stores checksums in memory and does not process any real data. While the File Proxy is fast because of the parallel processing providing high performance and scalability.

The Short-Term Retention – leverages the new NAS backup format and is for daily and weekly retention.

The Long-Term Retention – an older version of files and data with more extended retention requirements for months and years and uses cheaper storage to include object stores.  Retain incremental copies, and not full copies are not.

The Secondary Copy – provides short term full copy and is also used for DR purposes.

The File Tracking System is the “secret sauce.”

*COPYRIGHT 2019 VEEAM SOFTWARE

It provides for quick Check Sums on every folder and file, and the algorithm ignores files and folders that have no changes, the checking engine also scales with the number of proxies.  Allowing for quick incremental backups when there are large blocks of static data.  The diagram reflects this use case for incremental backups.

*COPYRIGHT 2019 VEEAM SOFTWARE

The next picture is an example reflecting speed when backing up mostly static data for like 50 million files and which takes around 13 minutes to backup.

*COPYRIGHT 2019 VEEAM SOFTWARE

The live demonstration showed how to backup and protect a file share with data of various file types and sizes by taking an ONTAP snapshot.  It simulated a Ransomware event and showed how one could roll back to a selected point in time snapshot to remediate the Ransomware Event.  The Veeam Restore Wizard replaced only the files that were changed, and so the restore was fast.  Backup and recovery are quick because of the CRC Engine algorithms. 

Veeam Enterprise Manager

The Veeam Enterprise Manager can provide self-service restores and perform a universal search, using the Self-Service HTML5 Interface, and can do a federated view and utilizes Role-Based Access Control.  Need to pick a backup, for example, from ONTAP, then do a search for a file or wild card search and restore files from the share.  Search from a file to recover can restore in place or to another location or can download into browser and review.

This Veeam NAS solution also works with the various cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google if they can present an SMB or NFS mount.

New Feature and Capabilities:

• Application Consistent HW Snapshot
• MS SQL and Oracle from Point-in-Time log replay
• ONTAP SVM Level Credentials Supported
• Restore Cloud-Native Workloads to VMware from the Cloud
• Object Lock S3 Immutable API Support for Cloud Tier (Prevent S3 delete/modifications)

Questions

What about backing up databases such as Oracle? 

The answer –  Veeam has other database solutions focused on database use cases that are more appropriate for databases.  This NAS solution is not a good fit for a database solution, and it is suitable for traditional NAS use cases for unstructured data.

What about rebuilding the cache if it is corrupted?

 The answer – Since there are multiple copies of the cache and it is in memory, rebuilds are fast.  The Cache is not super large, and for example, the cache size for 1 million files is about 2,100 KB.