In Veeam Backup & Replication v10, Veeam released the ability to protect your NAS shares and file servers at scale, the key differentiators being the storage agnostic approach and super-fast incremental backups of your unstructured data. NAS backup in V10 also enabled some fast and efficient ways to recover your NAS data, recovering what you want when you need it. You can see more about these differentiators here.
Veeam Backup & Replication v11 continues to focus on that NAS backup experience with a distinct focus on expanded recovery.
Changed file tracking native storage integration
NAS devices such as Dell EMC Isilon or NetApp ONTAP have become the de-facto when it comes to where businesses store their unstructured data (i.e. the data that we create as users every day, including documents, presentations, graphics, etc.) as well as the massive amount of data that devices in the Internet of Things are creating every second. Both storage vendors have also developed game-changing storage snapshot technologies and techniques. Therefore, in V11, we take our snapshot-friendly approach one step further, with the ability to integrate into these storage systems and orchestrate the native storage snapshot and then use this as the source for our backups.
Veeam has a history of strong storage integration via the Universal Storage API, which enables direct integration with storage systems to decrease impact on the production environment and significantly improve RPOs.
The main benefit here is the removal of impact on the production NAS volume — specifically, the file proxy will read data from the storage snapshot rather than the production NAS share. This also helps with locked files, meaning files will not be skipped because they are open by users at time of backup.
Dell EMC Isilon: Changed file tracking
A key feature of the way Veeam Backup & Replication differentiated with the NAS backup feature in V10 was around the ability to understand quickly and efficiently what had changed since the last backup. This was labelled changed file tracking with similarities to the Changed Block Tracking we see in our image-based backups.
In V11, we will bring the option to enable changed file tracking with Dell EMC Isilon, alongside the storage snapshot integration this will increase the performance of your NAS backups.
Maintain access during downtime with instant NAS recovery
One of the best things demonstrated with V10 and NAS backup was the use case around ransomware! Specifically, combating ransomware with the ability to roll back to a good restore point, i.e. before the attack. This is a great option for the final steps of the remediation plan, but during the remediation plan, you have a whole workforce without access to that important unstructured data, either because you have isolated the NAS or because it is infected and encrypted.
In V11, you can take advantage of the ability to take that last good or any restore point, regardless of size, and publish this out via a mount server so that your users can at least access their data. In this version this capability will be limited to SMB shares, and will be in a read-only state when published. During that remediation window, when all IT staff will be concentrating on getting services back up and running, having the ability to get those important files to your users is a great step in the right direction.
Once remediation has been completed and the restore to the last known good restore point has finished, then users will be able to update their own files and folders and continue without the downtime of not being able to access their data during the remediation phase.
Full control with version-based retention
For those of you that have been using Veeam NAS backup, you will have probably seen the version control when it comes to offloading to longer-term retention. In V11, this version control has been enhanced to also look at the primary backup so you will have the common version control to keep active and deleted file versions to your desired limit.
Improved deduplication appliance support
As always, this release would not be a Veeam release without some engine enhancements and some under-the-cover performance improvements. The way in which the NAS backup file format is stored in V10 uses 64Mb blobs to store the data in an object orientated way. To offer improved performance for customers backing up their NAS devices and file servers to many different locations, including deduplication appliances, V11’s blob size has been increased to 1GB. Thanks to this change, we are now seeing around 4x time improvement over the previous version for all integrated deduplication targets — and this also translates down to restore from those same devices where we are seeing over a 1x improvement on restore scenarios.
Last but not least, in V11 we will be introducing a meta-extent which will further improve the performance when sending your NAS backups to a deduplication appliance. This is going to allow you to store the metadata in a specific location which is recommended to be SSD, and this in addition to the engine enhancements will see more that 2x improvements on both full and incremental backups. This is going to be a configuration setting within the Scale-out Backup Repository and, as well as the performance with backups, it is also going to increase performance when it comes to restore operations as the metadata is used here vs the actual data.
In closing, we all know that NAS data is important to every business — and our focus at Veeam is to continue innovating and iterating by adding new features and functionality that make data management and protection for NAS simple, flexible and reliable.
Try Veeam Backup & Replication v11 today, FREE for 30 days to test and see for yourself the power of NAS protection offered with the NEW Instant NAS Recovery.
The launch of V11 also includes Azure-native backup and recovery (AWS-native came in V10). If you’re a current Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Availability Suite or Veeam Backup Essentials customer, we’re giving you 25 VUL FREE to natively protect your AWS or Azure workloads. What’s more, we’re even throwing in $250 in cloud credit of your choice to sweeten the offer. Check out all the offer details here and register to start natively protecting AWS and Azure workloads FREE!
