Applications are critical to businesses and ensuring their continuity is a top priority. Different applications and workloads carry different levels of criticality and need to be protected differently depending on your specific business needs. With workloads covering more platforms that extend past on-premises data into service provider clouds, the public cloud and SaaS based platforms, it’s important to understand how to protect key workloads no matter where they reside.
By breaking down your application workloads into levels of criticality, you can identify which ones need protecting at lower recovery point objectives (RPOs) and how quickly they need to be recovered, which is attached to the recovery time objectives (RTOs).
Historically, for key on-premises applications, RPOs of 15 minutes and RTOs of just minutes were acceptable. However, since businesses can’t afford to lose more data or time, per-second RPOs and almost instant RTOs are required. There also needs to be a target location that is not only reliable but cost effective as well.
Veeam’s latest Continuous Data Protection (CDP) enhancements are a game-changer for DRaaS and allows small businesses and large enterprises to protect their workloads with low RPOs and minimal data loss. With end-to-end, policy-based approaches and Veeam’s scalability and performance, CDP is DRaaS for the masses.
Introducing Veeam CDP for Veeam Cloud Connect Replication
With the launch of Veeam Backup & Replication v12 and our continued partnership with VMware R&D, Veeam now brings DRaaS to everyone by offering CDP to protect Tier One workloads that run on VMware vSphere to service provider cloud targets that are backed by VMware Cloud Director or vSphere-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Not only does this address the current RPO/RTO requirements, but by leveraging Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partners, you have the flexibility to ensure that reliability isn’t lost, and that cost remains manageable.
CDP and VMware’s vSphere APIs for I/O (VAIO)
VMware vSphere is still the dominant platform for virtual machine (VM) workloads that live on-premises, and Veeam Backup & Replication has been providing snapshot-based backups with RPOs of 5 – 15 minutes via Veeam Cloud Connect Replication since version 9.5. For on-premises workloads, the desire to drive RPOs down to seconds led us to develop VMware’s vSphere APIs for I/O filtering. This enables deeper access into the hypervisor to help you intercept input/output data directly as they occur.
This method enables organizations to set RPOs to seconds instead of minutes and transforms the way workloads can be protected.
Veeam’s CDP for VMware vSphere provides you with a new level of protection against critical data loss while ensuring business continuity. This allows for the almost immediate failover of VM workloads to a point in time with the ability to granularly slide back in time at per-second intervals.
CDP replicas can be failed over at specific points in time as dictated by your configured RPO. This granularity is key to ensuring minimal data loss and extremely low RTOs. Once a VM has been failed over, it can be failed back under a controlled set of options that are built into the failback process.
End-to-end policy-based approach
With Veeam Backup & Replication v12’s enhancements to CDP, we see a renewed focus on policy-based approaches to backup and replication. By categorizing applications and workloads, organizations can create end-to-end policies against VMs that span from seconds, to minutes, to a point-in-time, to longer-term archiving. Used in conjunction with vSphere Tags, there is almost no need to interact with your CDP policy once it has been configured. Assigning vSphere Tags to VMs will automatically add them to existing CDP policies and have them protected based on the set replication period. This results in less management and ensures that your new workloads are protected as they are created.
Simplicity with scalability and performance
Veeam CDP is flexible and easy to deploy. Once deployed and configured against a source and your target vSphere Cluster, policies can be created and managed by the backup administrator in the same console without additional training. Configuring the CDP I/O filter on a new or existing vSphere Cluster is done through a checkbox option under Veeam CDP filter management.
With CDP, Veeam has achieved the concept of a short-term retention window, with RPOs that start as low as two seconds. Within this window, data is replicated based on configured RPOs and recovery is as simple as sliding back to a point in time within your retention window. Longer-term retention of CDP-protected workloads can also be configured based on traditional points in time and stored at the target site for a set number of days.
We have entered an era where critical business applications require a higher, more reliable level of protection. With Veeam Backup & Replication v12, organizations can use a policy-driven approach to protect Tier One applications with per-second RPOs that stretch across a defined replication window. From there, those workloads can be recovered quickly and with minimal data loss that ensures your business continuity needs are met and your potential loss of reputation is avoided.
Take advantage of Veeam-powered DRaaS (including CDP) along with the expertise that comes with a global VCSP partner to ensure your applications are resilient when the unexpected happens. To find a Veeam-powered DRaaS partner near you, click here or learn more about Veeam-powered DRaaS here.
Already engaged with a Veeam Cloud Connect partner? Learn about many of the advanced features available in v12 and see how we are leading the charge in Modern Data Protection. Contact your partner to take advantage of CDP and much more!
