Get Rid of Backup Challenges Once and For All

Seeking to simplify the creation and consumption of offsite backup repositories,   Veeam released Cloud Connect last year. The innovative new toolset was the first solution designed specifically for service providers from both business and technical perspectives. Cloud Connect’s combination of ease of use and dependability made it an overnight success, and today hundreds of service providers have based their backup service offerings on Cloud Connect.

Still, as a first generation release, we at QMTechnologies knew many users who were left wondering when replication capabilities would be incorporated into the package. The good news is that Veeam has just announced the next version of their backup suite will feature next-generation replication capabilities.

The new replication feature, named Veamm Cloud Connect Replication, is a rapid and secure cloud-based disaster recovery solution. At QMTechnologies, we think it is a great solution for leveraging your replication technologies and creating virtual machines in an off-site replica.

In the past, end users faced a taxing problem when they set out to build a disaster recovery site – the sheer capital expense of building and maintaining the second site.

Add to the capital layout the issue of deploying new hardware and software and aligning it with their production environments. And don’t forget the arduous tasks of management and configuration. And finally, remember that production workloads are running primarily in the first site, and the backup is rarely used – thus it’s its cost is prohibitive when compared to its value.

Which is why many businesses are considering cloud-based alternatives – the attractive pay-as-you-go model and the ability to scale without burdensome capital costs make Veeam Cloud Connect a viable solution for many replication scenarios.

The best part? Replication through Veeam Cloud Connect couldn’t be easier. Its single port connectivity offers service providers a secure and reliable SSL/TLS connection. As a result, there are less administrative headaches – for example, no need to open multiple ports in your client’s firewalls or setup and maintain VPN connections.

Once the end user subscribes and connects to a service provider, they will see a multi-tenant view of the assigned disaster recovery site resources with RAM, CPU, networking, and storage allocation. In a nutshell, the cloud host serves as a replication target for jobs setup by the end user.

While you might expect Veeam Cloud Connect would offer full site failover, they have also taken things a step further with an innovative new partial site failover feature. This new feature makes it possible for end users to failover part of their workloads to the disaster recovery site while other VMs continue to run at the production site.

The Service Provider View

There is little doubt that Disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaas) is a popular requested service by end users. Armed with the new Veeam Cloud Connect Replication features, service providers will be empowered to create and deliver DRaaS services for Microsoft Hyper-V, vSphere, and VMware environments.

Thanks to the software’s multi-tenancy capabilities, service providers can provide total isolation of end users hosted on the same hardware and comprehensive network connectivity management for all failover types. The best part? It can all be accomplished without the need to license, learn, and maintain additional third-party software.

A Complete Solution

Let’s face it – great technology by itself is simply not enough to provide great services. To create a simple and efficient DR service, it takes more than innovative networking technologies and robust replication. Fortunately, Veeam Cloud Connect was forward-thinking enough to incorporate a few more critical components.

First,  they designed the product to be simple to use. For example, once end-users register for a service provider, a new virtual host is added to their B&R automatically. Replicating VM’s to their service provider infrastructure is as simple and straightforward as creating a new replication job and pointing it to service provider’s cloud host as the target.

Secondly, Veeam Cloud Connect eliminated the biggest frustration of traditional DR: networking. Their ingenious Network Extension appliances maintain communications between running replica VMs while partial and full failovers are processing regardless of their location. And the Network Extension appliances do this all without the need for changes to the TCP/IP settings before, during, or after a failover.

Another stellar innovation is the product’s bandwidth conservation. Compression, seeding, WAN acceleration, and replication from the backup are all packaged as part of Veeam Cloud Connect. This is critical for customers with slower WAN connections or those with larger data requirements.

In the end, though, perhaps the best new feature of Veeam Cloud Connect is their self-service model. The application is offered through a web portal running at the service provider. As such, it is accessible to their end users from almost any device and location. End users can log in and execute their failovers without assistance from the service provider.

At QMTechnologies, we feel this all of this makes for an exciting new release. Veeam plans to deploy Veamm Availability Suite v9 in Q3 of this year. We can’t wait to fill you in on all the new features and demonstrate it for you!