Improving Availability with Modern Storage

EnvironmentsToday’s storage technologies are in the midst of a disruptive evo-lution and the types of storage that businesses are using — and even the ways that they’re using it — is radically different from the past. Globalization and the consumerization of IT have re-sulted in the need for an Always-On™ business model with higher requirements for performance and Availability than ever before. Many businesses now require 24.7.365 Availability. Plus, today’s businesses need to deal with massive storage growth. IDC pre-dicts that data will continue to double every two years. Likewise,

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By Michael Otey

S P O N S O R E D B Y

Gartner forecasts data to grow 800% over the next five years, with 80% of it being unstructured data. This rapid data growth is coming from new technologies like Big Data, IoT and mobile devices. This makes working with modern-day storage vastly different from the simple file system and relational database storage that businesses needed to handle in the past. Traditional storage and data protection technologies like legacy Storage Area Networks (SANs) and backup data protection technologies were not designed to cope with today’s more demanding environments. IT storage technologies are evolving to meet these changing business requirements. Leveraging today’s new storage technologies can enable you to dramati-cally improve your application performance and availability as well as backup and recovery times. In this white paper, you’ll learn about some of today’s recent storage trends and the driving forces behind them. Then, you will discover how you can utilize the capabilities in these storage technologies to improve ap-plication performance and data Availability by using the Veeam® Availability Suite™.

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StorageTrendsThere are many important storage trends that have evolved to help you meet today’s rigorous perfor-mance and availability requirements. First, we will cover the emerging use of flash and all flash arrays (AFAs). Next, we’ll look at the growing use of hybrid cloud storage. Finally, we’ll look at the emergence of virtual storage technologies like VMware’s vSAN and Windows Server 2016’s Storage Space Direct. Each of these new technologies works to address today’s storage challenges in different ways.

Flash Storage Hybrid and All Flash Arrays (AFA)Without a doubt, moving to flash storage is one of today’s hottest trends. The performance characteristics of today’s systems are different from previous generations of servers. The high-performance capabilities of today’s multi-core CPUs in conjunction with increasing memory capacities and higher networking speeds have created a storage performance gap. Traditional rotational hard disk drives can’t keep up with today’s performance needs and often become performance bottlenecks. It wasn’t all that long ago when flash storage was considered a niche technology that you only used in special cases where you really needed it. Flash storage was considered expensive and the capacities were much smaller than traditional spinning hard disk drives. That has all changed over the past few years as prices for flash storage have dropped significantly and the capabilities and capacities have simultaneously increased. Now, businesses are opting to use flash storage as a part of hybrid arrays or the newer all-flash arrays (AFA).

• Hybrid Arrays — By combining both flash storage and traditional spinning disk drives, hybrid arrays are designed to combine the performance benefits of flash with large capacities and lower costs of ro-tating hard drives. They are designed to provide high-capacity storage and acceleration for multiple applications and they provide enterprise storage features like deduplication, compression snapshots and replication. Hybrid arrays provide a compromise between performance and capacity. They nor-mally provide automatic data tiering where hot or frequently accessed data is kept on flash storage and less frequently access data is stored on the slower disk drives. They do not have the performance of AFAs and can be more complex to set up and maintain. Hybrid arrays also experience a delay when moving the hot or cold data to the proper tier. They tend to be one step behind in providing the right tier storage based on the current performance needs and cost. They are not typically the best solution for highly dynamic environments.

• All Flash Arrays — Designed to provide the highest levels of performance for multiple applications, AFAs tend to be somewhat more expensive than hybrid arrays, but they provide much higher perfor-mance with sub-millisecond I/O along with enterprise-class storage features like built-in deduplica-tion, compression, snapshots and replication. The use of data reduction technologies such as built-in

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compression and deduplication often increases their effective storage capacity to rival traditional disk arrays. AFAs can support high performance mixed workloads and they can simplify storage management by eliminating the need to provide constant load-balancing to achieve acceptable and predicable performance for critical applications. Since AFAs have no rotating parts, they require much lower energy consumption to operate, and require less environmental cooling and footprint for overall operational cost savings. This more than compensates for the slightly higher cost of flash in mid and larger data centers.

Hybrid-Cloud StorageThe cloud has become an important storage option for many businesses. The cloud offers relatively inexpensive and virtually unlim-ited storage capabilities. While businesses were initially slow to adopt the cloud, con-tinuing advancements have made the cloud a core infrastructure component for many organizations. Most businesses today have moved into a hybrid-cloud strategy with Gartner estimating that half of all businesses are using some form of hybrid cloud and 72% of enterprises are pursuing a hybrid-cloud strategy. IDC estimates that 80% of organizations will use hybrid-cloud architectures by 2018 and that nearly half of IT spending will be on the cloud.

Businesses are widely using the cloud for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications like Office 365, In-frastructure as a Service (IaaS) for running VMs in the cloud as well as using the cloud as a backup and disaster recovery (DR) site. One of the biggest hybrid-cloud storage advancements has been the ability of on-premises storage systems to seamlessly connect to the cloud. Several of today’s modern storage systems like Microsoft’s StorSimple and Nimble Storage (recently acquired by HPE) can use local flash storage for performance and then combine that with seamless cloud access for data archival and backup. These systems typically use predictive analytics to know when to store data on flash or local storage and when to store data in the cloud. This combination enables the hybrid cloud to provide virtually unlimited expansion of capacity —as well as data availability capabilities.

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Latency is one of the most significant limitations of using cloud storage. Your connection to the internet and different cloud providers may seem simple, but if you ever considered the actual connection details using a tool like Traceroute, you’ll see that the connections to your cloud provider typically involve many connections and numerous hops. While this is usually fine for web browsing or running SaaS and Plat-form as a Service (PaaS) applications, it is often too slow for latency sensitive operations like storage. Storage access requires much higher bandwidth than web browsing. To help deal with latency-sensitive applications, both Microsoft and Amazon offer option high-performance, low-latency connections to their cloud storage and services. Microsoft provides Azure ExpressRoute and Amazon offers AWS Direct Connect. These are both Layer 3 virtual private connections that enable a direct connection from your on-premises or colocation facilities to your cloud providers. These connections are provided in conjunc-tion with tier-1 internet providers like Equinix, Level3 COMCAST, CenturyLink or Verizon. They can support block-level storage access and you can purchase up to 10 Gbps of bandwidth. Multiple links are provided for built-in redundancy. These types of low latency connections do cost more. They are typically charged according to the level of bandwidth provided, which can work to offset the potential savings provided by cloud storage.

Virtual SANs Virtual storage and Software-Defined Storage (SDS) are new storage technologies that are already making a big impact on businesses. Virtual storage enables businesses to replace expensive and complex SANs with the storage aggregated from a collection of multiple industry-standard x86 servers. VMware’s vSAN and Microsoft Windows Storage Spaces Direct are two common examples of virtual storage implemen-tations. They provide highly available and highly scalable SDS at much lower costs than a traditional SAN. Virtual SAN storage can consist of hybrid storage with mixed hard drives and SSDs or it can be

all flash. The storage pools together provide highly re-silient shared storage that is suitable for running VMs, business critical applications, virtual desktops and other IT applications. Virtual SAN storage provides the same type of advanced storage features that you would find in a traditional SAN, including deduplication, compression and encryption. VMware’s vSAN implementation also supports the use of snapshots. These implementations can scale from two to 64 hosts per cluster, and adding new nodes can increase both capacity and performance.

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Improving AvailabilityAs mentioned earlier, factors such as the consumerization of IT, the rapidly growing use of mobile devices and the use of big data and new business analytics have resulted in many businesses needing to have 24.7.365 Availability. Downtime can be extremely costly, and today’s businesses now have zero tolerance for it. The 2017 Veeam Availability Report found the average annual cost of downtime is $21.8 M. The average cost per hour of downtime for a mission-critical application was just under $80,000 while the average cost per hour of data loss resulting from the downtime for a mission-critical application was just under $90,000. The average cost per hour of downtime for non-mission-critical applications was $50,000. The costs of downtime are more than just lost revenue. The loss of customer confidence, damage to their organization’s brand and reputation, as well as the loss of employee confidence can also have huge im-pacts on the business operations and even the ability to remain competitive.

Today’s businesses need to implement new approaches to handle the increasing demands for availability. While backup is the core of all enterprise data protection strategies, traditional backup and recovery was designed for an older generation of IT technology where the infrastructure was primarily composed of physical servers that aren’t equipped to meet today’s more rigorous demands. Most companies are now highly virtualized and many use hybrid-cloud environments. Data protection and availability technolo-gies need to evolve to meet the needs of today’s highly virtualized infrastructures. Virtualization has re-duced costs, provided greater ROI and increased flexibility for business-critical applications. However, as VM density has continued to increase, maintaining performance and application availability for your server and storage infrastructure becomes more difficult. Today’s Always-On environment has no win-dow for scheduling backups or downtime, and requires the ability to quickly restore applications, data and whole environments.

Let’s have a look at some of the ways in which you can utilize the capabilities in these modern storage tech-nologies to improve application and data availability. Veeam’s tight integration with today’s virtualization platforms and modern storage technologies can signif-icantly improve the availability as well as your recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) of your business-critical applications. Veeam Backup & Replication™ is directly integrated with the

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storage snapshot capabilities of the leading storage platforms with support for complex multi-vendor storage environments. Veeam supports the following storage products and can leverage their capabilities for improved availability:

• Cisco HyperFlex • Dell EMC Unity• Dell EMC VNX• Dell EMC VNXe• Dell EMC Data Domain Boost• HPE 3PAR StoreServ• HPE StoreVirtual • HPE StoreOnce Catalyst• NetApp FAS• NetApp E-Series• Nimble Storage — a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company

Fast Backup Using Storage SnapshotsMany of today’s hybrid and all flash arrays support taking point-in-time snapshots of the production storage environment. Using these snapshots can greatly enhance backup and recovery performance with little to no impact on the production environment. Using array-based snapshots enables the hypervisor resources to be dedicated to maintaining the performance of your business-critical VMs while the storage system is responsible for creating and maintaining the snapshots. Taking advantage of storage snapshots can enhance RPOs. The ability to create more recovery points provides more flexibility for recovery and reduces the potential for loss of critical data. Many organizations take backups once a day, which results in a 24-hour RPO. Some businesses backup critical systems every four hours, which results in a four-hour RPO. Because of their minimal overhead, you can perform storage snapshots far more frequently — as often as every 15 minutes — drastically increasing the available restore points.

Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots allows organizations to use storage snapshots for backup, replica-tion and fast recovery across a broad range of storage platforms. Snapshots can accelerate backup perfor-mance by 20x and enable recovery performance to be improved with minimal impact on the production environment. Using Veeam with storage snapshots enables far faster backup and recovery, compared with traditional storage snapshot technologies alone. While hypervisor-based snapshots don’t require any special hardware integration with the storage platform, they use resources on the virtualization host,

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negatively impacting VM and application performance. You can see an overview of Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Backup from Storage Snapshots

First, Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots prepares the VM for the backup with an application-aware VMware snapshot. Then a storage volume snapshot is taken and the VMware snapshot is quickly released to limit VM disruption. The Veeam backup proxy then reads the data directly from the storage snapshot. There is no need to mount the storage volume snapshot to a host and register it as a datastore. Backup from Storage Snapshots is also able to take advantage of VMware’s changed block tracking (CBT) infor-mation, keeping the incremental backups fast and efficient. Finally, the storage backup is moved to the repository. While storage snapshots can be taken frequently with minimal impact to the production en-vironment, they shouldn’t be your only backup solution. Even with storage-based replication, you need to send backups to another medium to protect your organization from possible storage failure or malicious malware. Veeam can then copy that production data off your SAN to separate the backup repository.

Instant VM Recovery From Storage SnapshotsAn advantage of using data protection software that’s tightly integrated with AFAs is the ability to perform an instant recovery of the VM using flash-based snapshots. Veeam’s integration with storage snapshots lets you recover VMs in minutes using Instant VM Recovery®. Instant VM Recovery can be run from a VM backup or you can run it from a storage snapshot using Veeam Explorer™ for Storage Snapshots. Recovery from standard SAN-based snapshots is a time-consuming process. To perform a recovery with

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volume-level snapshots, you first need to promote the snapshot to a volume that must then be mounted to a host before the process of recovering the VM or data can begin. Instant VM Recovery provides intel-ligence to the storage snapshot, enabling fast, efficient, recovery of VMs directly from a storage snapshot. Instant VM Recovery can restore a VM in as little as two minutes, enabling you to quickly move a VM from a storage snapshot to production. Instant VM Recovery migrates the VM from the storage snapshot to your production environment in the background. You can restart the VM from any restore point and the backup of the VM remains read-only. Changes are stored separately and merged when the VM is mi-grated back to production storage. You can see an overview of Instant VM Recovery in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Instant VM Recovery using Storage Snapshots

The VM is registered from a storage snapshot, started and then copied into a production volume. This greatly reduces recovery time and provides improved application availability. The low overhead of le-veraging storage snapshots enables you to create more frequent restore points and increases RPOs and granular protection. The rapid recovery capabilities improve your RTOs.

Snapshots can also be useful for testing and troubleshooting. Veeam Backup & Replication offers the On-Demand Sandbox™ capability, which allows you to start VMs from snapshots existing on the production

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storage array. You can use the On-Demand Sandbox to quickly clone production VMs for testing, trouble-shooting and training. The sandboxed VM runs completely independently from the original production VM. To use the On-Demand Sandbox, you need to create a virtual lab that mirrors the networking settings of the production environment. You additionally need an application group that contains all the VMs that you want to run in the On-Demand Sandbox. You can select VMs directly from volumes or LUNs on the storage system. Instant VM Recovery is used to start the VM in the virtual lab. When you finish working with the On-Demand Sandbox, the VM is removed from the host and the virtual lab is powered off.

Granular Restore Using Storage SnapshotsThe clear majority of restore requests from users are for the granular restores of individual objects and files. Most are not requests for full VM images or full-volume recoveries. Granular restore capability im-proves efficiency by allowing you to just restore the specific data that you need. In addition to enabling Instant VM Recovery from storage snapshots, Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots also provides gran-ular visibility into storage snapshots with the ability to recover single files, groups of files or entire VMs from Storage Snapshots, providing the business with increased agility and efficiency. Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots integrates with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), NetApp, Dell, EMC and Nimble Storage to enable you to select individual files from storage snapshots and restore them in under two minutes without the need for staging or other intermediate steps. Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots is included in the Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam Backup Free Edition.

Veeam also provides several applications-based explorers that enable fine-grained recovery from some of the widely used server applications. They enable you to browse and search the contents of Veeam backup files, then optionally restore individual files and items.

• Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory: View and restore all Active Directory (AD) object types, including users, groups, computer accounts and contacts.

• Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange: View and restore individual Exchange items, including in-dividual email messages, contacts, and notes.

• Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server: Restore your SQL Server databases to a desired point-in-time using agentless transaction-log backup and replay.

• Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint: View and restore specific SharePoint files. You can recover items to their original SharePoint server or you can send them as email attachments.

• Veeam Explorer for Oracle: Restore individual Oracle databases with ease, without needing an exten-sive Oracle background or having to search for database and transaction-log files.

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Protection for Mixed Physical, Virtual and Cloud WorkloadsWhile most businesses today are highly virtualized, they still have workloads that are running on stand-alone physical Windows or Linux systems as well as on VMs in the cloud. And, they need their backup technology to be able to protect these different types of systems. Based on the technology from Veeam endpoint protection, Veeam Availability Suite now has added agents for Microsoft Windows and Linux, enabling it to provide backup protection to physical Windows and Linux systems as well as Windows and Linux VMs that are running in Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS). Agents are not required to backup Hyper-V or vSphere VMs, but their addition can extend protection to physical and cloud work-loads, closing the protection gap which enterprises with heterogeneous environments face. The use of Veeam Agents for Microsoft Windows and Linux also provides workload mobility protection by enabling backup for mobile endpoints. They enable you to meet RPOs for laptops and tablets outside the corporate network — and allow your entire enterprise to be protected by the same backup technology, including VMs, physical servers running Windows or Linux, mobile endpoints running on laptops and desktops, as well as VMs running on AWS or Microsoft Azure. You can see an overview of using Veeam Agents-based backup in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Using Veeam Agents to extend protection to physical and cloud workloads

You can backup to local disk, a shared network folder or the backups can be stored in the Veeam Re-pository. You can also backup Windows-based workloads off site to the cloud using Veeam Cloud Con-

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nect. The Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure enables you to restore Windows-based physical servers and endpoints directly to Microsoft Azure as VMs. Backup data and network transfers can be secured with source-side encryption without any negative impact on backup processing.

Leveraging Cloud Storage for Backup and DRAs more businesses are moving to a hybrid cloud environment taking advantage of the cloud’s low cost storage for backups and DR makes a lot of sense. Veeam Cloud Connect can leverage cloud storage from multiple cloud providers to provide fast and secure cloud backup, restore and replication. Veeam doesn’t offer its own cloud for storing VM data. Instead, Veeam Backup & Replication can be integrated with different service providers (SPs), enabling you to securely store your VM backups and replication on dif-ferent cloud providers like Azure and AWS.

Figure 4: Protecting virtual, physical and cloud workloads

Veeam Cloud Connect can leverage the private cloud, the managed cloud and the public cloud to provide enterprise level data protection. It can extend the backup and replication provided by Veeam Availability Suite to the cloud for your VMs, physical servers and mobile endpoints. Its components consist of an SP version of Veeam Backup Server, the cloud gateway, cloud repositories and replication resources. The Veeam Backup Server running on the SP side provides the configuration and control for the Veeam Cloud Connect infrastructure. It communicates with the Veeam Backup & Replication database and connects tenants to cloud repositories. The cloud gateway is a network appliance that resides with the SP

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and acts as communication point in the cloud, routing commands and traffic between the tenants and the cloud repository. Cloud repositories are cloud-based storage locations that contain backups of your VMs. They can provide additional backup storage locations and media types, helping you to meet the 3-2-1 rule of backup best practices. Replication resources are dedicated compute, storage and network resources provided by the SP. To the tenant, they are cloud hosts. You can store VM backups replicas on cloud hosts and use these replicas from the Veeam Availability Suite to failover to the cloud in case of a disaster or outage on your data center.

SummaryModern storage systems have new capabilities that are designed to handle the performance and availabil-ity needs of today’s enterprises. Integrating these new features like snapshots, virtual storage and cloud integration with the data protection capabilities in Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 empowers you to dramati-cally improve application availability and reduce VM and data recovery times to minutes.

Holding on to legacy data protection approaches puts your data at risk and fails to leverage the capabili-ties of today’s modern storage systems. Updating your data protection and restore capabilities and taking advantage of the features in the today’s modern storage systems can enable you to improve your availabil-ity to meet the Always-On needs of today’s highly virtualized, hybrid-cloud data centers. l

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