A little over four years ago, Veeam introduced the Scale-out Backup Repository. Since that time, we increased its capabilities most recently with the Veeam Cloud Tier. If you’re not using the Scale-out backup repository, you should be. I’ll explain why.
Reason #1
The performance tier is a logical element composed of many extents of underlying repositories. This makes the removal or addition of backup storage very easy. If you needed additional backup storage, you simply add an extent to the performance tier. Additionally, if a device is approaching end of life or its lease is up, simply put it in maintenance mode and evacuate the backups from it.
Reason #2
The capacity tier (same tier I referred to above as the Cloud Tier) can become infinite with the cloud. The capacity tier can transparently place backup data into the cloud with some serious intelligence. The more I use the capacity tier with object storage, the more I realize how powerful it is. This is a great way to reduce the cost of disk resources on premises by extending the backup targets to the cloud.
Reason #3
Performance policies can be very granular with the Scale-out Backup Repository. This is a key feature as different storage systems have different characteristics. For example, a deduplication appliance will do really good with full backup files in regard to storage efficiency. And general-purpose storage may do better with manipulations associated with incremental backups. The performance policy below allows you to set the performance tier configuration as such, as granular as you would like:
You can optionally set a locality policy, this will keep full backups and increments together. This is way more intelligent than making different repositories and complicating the job setup to get the performance the way you want it.
Reason #4
Abstracting the underlying extents won’t cause you to miss a restore point. This is a great technique where if an extent is offline for an unplanned (or planned) reason, the backup job will still proceed but to another extent. This is great in that there won’t be a failed backup job and therefore less restore points due to a component issue. This is visualized below:
Reason #5
Even if you only have one repository, there is a great use case for the Scale-out Backup Repository. Specifically, if your backup storage becomes full you can get out of that problem with ease. With the Scale-out Backup Repository, you can simply add another extent, evacuate the backups from the old storage, and then remove the old storage (this process is documented in Help Center).
Closing thoughts
The Scale-out Backup Repository is one of Veeam’s unique innovations that really brings a lot of capabilities to the backup storage management, yet in a simple, flexible and reliable manner. I saved this until the end of the post as I’m going to use buzz words, but I also believe the Scale-out Backup Repository does an outstanding job of being a software-defined, cloud-ready, completely agnostic way to manage backup storage. If you would like to try the Scale-out Backup Repository, watch a recent video I made on the topic and download a trial of Veeam Backup & Replication.
Read More:
Video: Insights on adjusting Veeam Scale-Out Backup Repository