Veeam for backup solutions

Be it on Cloud or on-premises, Virtual Machine backup solutions are scalable and makes data Hyper-available. One of the leading solutions that companies use for Backup and Replication is Veeam. This article talks about the architecture of Veeam and investigates the advantages of Veeam solution over other backup solutions.

First of all Backup and Replication are NOT interchangeable words in the Compute world. Backup is a physical storage of copies of files and folders as images whereas, Replication is a Disaster Recovery solution that makes possible rendering of the file as is, on a second-to-second basis.

Also to be noted is the fact that backups are not the same as snapshots. Snapshots record delta changes from a certain point of time. The files can lie on the same storage infrastructure as the parent disks. If the base disks are deleted, the snapshots are not enough for restoring. Whereas, backups do not have any such dependencies on parent disks.

The following architecture is from the Veeam user-guide that explains how Veeam works in detail. The efficiency of the architecture relies on the fact that only incremental data is backed up and replicated.

How Veeam Backup Works How Veeam Replication Works

Fig 1: Veeam Backup and Replication Architecture

Veeam solutions are used both on-premises and on cloud. In Cloud it offers Disaster Recovery As A Service (DRaaS). With Veeam, you no longer need to maintain additional offsite VM replicas. However, Veeam is exclusive for virtual machines that use VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.

Veeam competes with backup providers like Commvault, Acronis, DellEMC, Carbonite to name a few. Now what makes Veeam the best in the industry is it’s speed. Veeam also recommends planning and best practices. It makes integrations to storage-based snapshots possible.

VMware vSAN is a hyper converged technology that is gaining popularity. It doesn’t use traditional storage protocols. Veeam can work with vSAN also unlike most of it’s competitors.

Published by mindovertechnologyblog

I work as a Cloud Architect at an IT firm in Trivandrum, Kerala. I am passionate about technology and I love to write. I created this blog to satisfy both my passions. The title of this blog is inspired by the need of having a mind that hovers over technology and grasps the grand scheme of things rather than get stuck in the nitty gritty. You would see a lot of my articles written in the area of Cloud Computing since that is my present focus. But I will deviate and create space for other emerging IT areas like Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Big Data, IoT etc. Please tune in and share your feedback on the posts. View more posts

Originally published at http://mindovertechnologyblog.wordpress.com on March 11, 2020.