Veeam Backup and Replication Cloud Enabled Edition

Veeam has just recently released backup and replication cloud edition. This allows you to use public cloud storage to store your backup as Veeam has written the required API to connect to these providers. Currently it supports the following 15 cloud storage providers listed below and I believe it will grow as the up take of the product happens:

Amazon S3
Amazon Glacier
Azure
Openstack
Rackspace
Google
HP Cloud
Clodo
Haylix
Scality
Dunkel
Tiscali
HostEurope
DreamObjects
GreenQloud
Seeweb
Connectria
Walrus
Mezeo


Veeam is a great backup product and I have been using it in my test lab to help me backup my lab machines. There are some questions which should be thought through before using a cloud storage provider for backup;

• Does your data have to be held within a country? region?  due to sensitivity? or restricts? As you may not know how these providers distribute or store your data you need to understand this in case it is breaking some laws for the data you have

• Most providers charge you very low cost to store the data but when you recover the data they charge you to transfer out. So check how often you need to restore and how much data you normally recover to give you a rough idea how much it could cost you over a period of time

• Do these provider offer alternative way to retrieve the data? ie sending you the drive?. Reason is that if you lost 5 virtual machines and you needed to retrieve 300GB data across the wire how long would that take? could you do it within your SLA you have with your customers/users?. If your primary data centre failed would you be retrieve the data somewhere else?. You don't want to be thinking about these issues when a disaster strikes

•  Are there support numbers you can call and speak to someone? or is it just via email?

• Can you just retrieve the data yourself or do you need to log a call first?, some providers archive to tape so a support ticket it required to be log so that they can load the tape for you, this means the SLA times will change as well for you and customer

• Does you current internet pipe have the capacity to take the backup transfer load as well?, do you need to upgrade? you don't want your backup and recovery disrupting your main business

• How secure is your data held at their data centre?, do system administrators at the provider have access to your data without your knowledge? are you in control of your data?

• Have the investment you made for your current backup infrastructure paid for itself now? was a lot of capital investment made for it and to change to the new cloud backup would mean you would need to write off the investment?

• What happens if the company goes bankrupt or shuts down?, can you still get your data?

These are some of my thoughts that you should consider before moving your backup to the cloud. I agree it could save you money i.e. no capital spend (some companies like that) but do check that the cost is not hidden in something else like needing to upgrade your internet pipe or the cost of retrieving data. Also it sounds good that you can move from provider to provider but in reality would you do it? given the amount of data you would need to move and more management overhead required to look after these providers. By all means test it with Veeam before you commit to changing your whole backup strategy to using cloud storage as this is a big jump in my opinion.

Here is the link to the new product from Veeam :
http://www.veeam.com/cloud-backup-vmware-hyper-v.html?ad=btn