Posts by Rick Vanover

When it comes to ensuring the Availability of SAP environments, enterprises need to ensure their expectations are met. Recently, I collaborated with a few of my peers and experts in the industry to provide detailed, technical information on ensuring the Availability of SAP environments with Veeam. If you have SAP, it’s an important part of your business, and ensuring its Availability goes without saying.

In my last post, I outlined a number of new enterprise scalability features: Backup acceleration technologies, full VM-restore acceleration technologies and core engine enhancements. Part of the announcement for 9.5 was about the new advanced ReFS integration, which I’ll cover in this post as it is a significant technology for Veeam. Let’s dig in!

Last month, when we hosted the Next Big Thing virtual event, we unveiled the latest parts of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5: Enhanced enterprise scalability and advanced ReFS integration, and we have received many questions on both topics. In this post, we will dive deeper into the enterprise scalability enhancements — and I will explain the advanced ReFS integration in another post as it is a significant technology of its own.

I’m enjoying this series of blogs! This is a great way to share information about the best practices for the VMware backup experience. This post will now vary slightly from the other two and talk about the backup repository. This was another breakout session from Anton Gostev at VeeamON 2015 (those who attended were lucky to get the live experience) and will surely be a great one to catch in 2017 in New Orleans. This will be written in mind of Veeam Backup & Replication v9, but can be a starting point to making good changes in your environment.

We are now ready for the second post in this series, and we will now cover the VMware Backup Proxy. This is truly the workhorse of your backup infrastructure, so this will definitely be of interest to many readers!

When it comes to deciding what are can be considered “BEST” practices, a lot can be up for interpretation. One thing that we do know for sure is that when Gostev presented VT-466 VMware Backup Best Practices: 2015 Edition there was something for everyone to learn. This was without a doubt one of the most popular sessions from VeeamON 2014 and 2015, and I can’t wait to see what the 2017 edition will look like!

That being said, we’ve decided to release a few key points here in a blog series from this session from last year, to share the knowledge and ramp up for VeeamON 2017.

Many times when I explain how Veeam backups work, people have questions about how data is moved for incremental backups. In addition, there are frequent questions about the differences between incremental and differential backups. In this post, I’ll explain these differences and show what Veeam does and why the options are what they are today.

Veeam Availability Suite v9 introduced integration for EMC VNX and VNXe hybrid storage arrays. These are a great storage system to run your vSphere VMs and also for leveraging Veeam. If you have one of these arrays, even if you aren’t a Veeam customer, you should really check out this integration.

Let’s first identify what parts of the data center we are talking about. From a storage perspective, any EMC VNX or VNXe storage system (including VNX2), a vSphere installation (except the free hypervisor) and a Veeam Backup & Replication system may be used, including Veeam Backup Free Edition for the restore technique from the storage snapshots.

Though virtualization has become the new normal for businesses of all sizes, physical server infrastructures are still quite widespread. Do you think that the companies using traditional, physical server networks are wasting money? This post will show you why this is exactly the case! Let’s start with what we used to have when physical servers were the normal platform of choice. The architecture of a physical server is quite plain. Each server has its own hardware: Memory, network, processing and storage resources. On this hardware, the server operating system is loaded. From the OS you can then run the applications. Pretty straight-forward.

Data centers of today are dealing with three serious challenges: 24/7 operations, no patience for downtime or data loss and a growing amount of data. Investments in modern storage systems can help the Always-On Business run and meet these needs, but there is a challenge on where and how we will store backup data for the data center of today.

The natural choice to meet this challenge is to leverage deduplicating storage systems, and HP StoreOnce Catalyst is coming in Veeam Backup & Replication v9 (Part of Veeam Availability Suite). HP StoreOnce Catalyst allows companies to take control of data by providing enhanced backup performance and control for data movement across the enterprise.