Veeam presented a couple of new features for their Backup & Recovery suite at Tech Field Day 20. Three of them stand out for me: the Scale-out Backup Repository, Enhanced NAS backup, and Continuous Data Protection. The first one is a logical container to bundle other backup repositories in. The second because backing up large NAS filesystems is hard, especially if you want to maintain a low RPO. And talking about RPO’s, there’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP) which protects your volume or VM with an RPO of seconds. Let’s explore what’s changing and when we can expect to see these features in the field.
Continuous Data Protection
Back at Storage Field Day 16 in Boston, Zerto presented their VM replication software. It’s a block level, continuous hypervisor based replication, using a journal to log I/O in a VCR-like fashion. This enables you to rewind to any point in time that’s covered in the journal, and recover your VMs to that exact state. Zerto’s plans are a bit grander than “just VM Replication” though… they aim to cover the complete IT Resiliency market.
Today I visited a customer to connect two RecoverPoint clusters. One RecoverPoint cluster is connected to a Unity array, the other to a VNX. After installing both clusters, we ran the RecoverPoint Connect Cluster wizard and were greeted with an “Internal Error. Contact support” error message. Awesome! Fortunately it turned out to be a pretty basic error which was easy to fix. A short story about RecoverPoint installation types in mixed-array configurations…