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Today we announced 2 disruptive innovations that will be available in Veeam Backup & Replication v7: Built-in WAN Acceleration and Backup from Storage Snapshots.
Over the past few months, you may have seen our announcements regarding the 7 new market-leading features coming in v7; if not, you can check them out here: http://go.veeam.com/v7.
There is tremendous interest in v7, and I wanted to offer some additional explanation here about our Built-in WAN Acceleration.
Built-in WAN Acceleration
Yes, we’re going to be including WAN acceleration in Veeam Backup & Replication v7. This is not a “general purpose” WAN accelerator, but functionality specifically tuned for Veeam data transfers across the WAN. The major benefit to start is that if you need to “copy” your backups to an offsite location, we can determine what data blocks are already there and send less data across the WAN connection. Our WAN acceleration includes global caching, variable length dedupe, traffic compression, TCP/IP optimizations (multi-threading, provisions for high latency links) and resume on disconnect.
By being “content aware” – and with what is effectively an infinite cache (source and target backup repositories) – we don’t need to “learn” and cache traffic patterns like a general purpose WAN accelerator does. This is what makes Veeam WAN acceleration more efficient than a general purpose WAN accelerator.
In keeping with our Powerful, Easy-to-Use and Affordable approach, setting up Built-in WAN Acceleration is as easy as deploying a new WAN Accelerator role (similar to Proxy and Repository roles). You can install WAN accelerators on existing proxies and repositories. Just install a WAN accelerator component at the source site and at the target site, and you’re ready to go. We estimate that WAN-accelerated backup transfers will be up to 50x faster than a traditional file copy across the WAN. Think about how much increasing your WAN connection bandwidth 50x would cost you! With v7 you don’t have to – it’s included with Veeam Backup & Replication!
And if you’ve already deployed a general purpose WAN accelerator, you can configure it to bypass Veeam traffic, thereby freeing up its CPU resources and cache for other traffic.
WAN accelerators in the Backup Infrastructure view
Adding a new WAN accelerator
Configuring the global cache for a WAN accelerator
Built-in WAN Acceleration is a feature of the new Backup Copy jobs. Our customers have told us that they need an easier way to make copies of their backups, whether it’s onsite or offsite. Because Veeam stores backups in a standard file structure, many customers today are using rsync or other file copy tools to make additional copies of their backups. While this works, it’s not the most efficient method and also makes it difficult to maintain different retention policies in the different repositories. The Backup Copy job is meant to solve that, and best of all you don’t need to change your existing Backup jobs – just create a new Backup Copy job. The Backup Copy job is per-VM, meaning you don’t have to copy all the VMs in the backup, and 1 Backup Copy job can copy VM backups from different backups and even different repositories into a single backup file. You add VMs to a Backup Copy job similar to how you add them to a Backup job. The Backup Copy job also has independent retention settings, and you can also specify grandfather/father/son (GFS) policies (yearly, quarterly, monthly and weekly fulls) to meet your long-term backup archiving requirements. A big benefit is that you can keep a small number of restore points for operational restores in the primary backup repository using fast storage, and get the fastest backup and restore performance. And, in addition to that, you can have a long-term repository onsite or offsite on slower storage with low cost per TB (such as deduplicating storage).
Retention policy settings for a Backup Copy job
With our synthetic backup technology, all “full backups” are generated from existing full and incremental backups, so there’s no need to create new “real” full backups periodically and copy them across the WAN.
We’re very excited to introduce Built-in WAN Acceleration in v7. While initially for Backup Copy jobs, WAN acceleration will also be available for Replication jobs in a future release.
