Recently, SoftNAS® joined the Veeam Alliance Partner Program to help joint customers optimize their cloud backups, restore and disaster recovery capabilities by effectively leveraging the public cloud. The solution offers a unique combination of performance and cost efficiency for off-site cloud backups.
As more businesses recognize the importance of a viable disaster recovery plan, public cloud platforms have quickly emerged as a great option for storing backups. Not only do businesses today contend with environmental events (e.g. hurricanes, fires) and malware, there is also a demand for data to be available 24×7. These factors prove how important it is for a business to have a copy of their data off-site.
Businesses that have embraced off-site backup and availability benefit by being better prepared to proactively respond to these threats. Implementing modern data protection means evaluating and potentially even investing in new capabilities to maintain business continuity. In today’s world, this could mean the difference between future prosperity and a business-impacting failure.
Cloud storage is a viable option because it:
- Is physically isolated in separate location.
- Is elastic and scalable based upon the needs of the business with minimal CAPEX investment.
- Provides a DR hosting environment for restoring applications.
In a Q4 2017 research survey by the Taneja Group, 41% of customers planned to leverage public clouds for backups.[1] The 2017 Veeam Availability Report provides similar results as 48% of customers surveyed reported investments or planned investments in the next twelve months in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and over 50% in Backup as a Service (BaaS).[2]
Veeam Backup & Replication provides businesses the ability to easily and quickly recover data, extending far beyond simply copying data to a secondary location. The ability to create multiple restore points via the Veeam synthetic merges or incremental backups provides customers the ability to select the restore point. To best leverage these advanced capabilities, an investment in a high-performance storage system to process reads and writes effectively may be required. Businesses may feel the need to invest in a robust block-based NAS storage system requiring a significant upfront capital investment.
While backing up data is the primary objective, it is also important to consider the size of the backup window. Throughput is a necessary consideration for backup job completion, requiring the appropriate resources.
A common misconception is that, to achieve cost savings there must be a trade-off in performance. A conventional option for affordable off-site backups are tape archives or VTL alternatives. While this may satisfy an audit requirement and require less initial CAPEX investment, when the need to hastily recover data occurs, tape may not be the most compelling option. Restoring applications via tape can be slow and recovering from multiple restore points can be problematic. Public clouds are a viable option to maintain backups off-site, offering the business the opportunity to quickly recover via multiple restore points and maintain availability. In the event of a physical on-premises failure, cloud-based DR provides a means of restoring applications and data to a VM instance in the cloud, further enhancing restore capabilities.
Buurst SoftNAS Solution for Cloud Backups
Buurst SoftNAS Essentials provides a great solution for customers that desire a more modern approach to offsite backup. By leveraging object-based data stores (e.g. Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 or Azure Block Blob) your business can leverage inexpensive and scalable storage in the public cloud. When leveraging object storage, you may assume you must cope with native object API interfaces instead of native NAS protocols like NFS or CIFS. You may also assume performance may be impacted with object storage. SoftNAS helps customers overcome these obstacles by presenting an NFS interface. SoftNAS patent pending ObjFast™ technology enhances object storage so customers can expect performance metrics associated with block storage. This increases cost efficiency and performance while leveraging the benefits of the public cloud. The result is improved DR with the RTO/RPO benefits you receive from an on-premises storage alternative.
Summary
As a Veeam partner and customer, the solution we’ve created is exactly what we’ve been looking for to back-up our own infrastructure. Alternatives such as cloud gateways were deemed too slow and unreliable for our needs. We wanted a cost-effective option that performed well when leveraging synthetic merges. We now leverage this combined solution for backup jobs via a VPN connected to an NFS share presented by SoftNAS Essentials™ running in the cloud with an object data store back end.
Just like us, we think you will greatly appreciate these benefits:
- Improved recovery times (RTOs), flexible RPO settings, and faster restore times than tape or VTL alternatives.
- Near block storage performance using the SoftNAS ObjFast™ technology tuned specifically for Veeam backup jobs (e.g. full and synthetic full).
- Lower total cost of ownership leveraging object storage instead of cloud block storage.
- Fast, flexible and reliable recovery of your applications and data to help you meet your SLA requirements.
Next Steps
Learn more about cloud-based enterprise architecture options at www.SoftNAS.com. We have years of experience helping customers make this transition quickly and easily. We understand you may have questions and we’d be pleased to help you make a successful transition to the cloud. SoftNAS is used by thousands of organizations around the world to protect their data in the cloud, achieve a 100% up-time SLA for business-critical applications and move applications, data and workloads into the cloud with confidence.
You can get started with SoftNAS on Azure or AWS in multiple ways:
- Take a Free Azure Test Drive: Get started in under two minutes using the Azure Test Drive. This option allows you to quickly try SoftNAS without having to install or configure anything. The SoftNAS instance loads automatically, connects the Azure storage account and pre-provisions multiple storage volumes/LUN using NFS, CIFS/SMB, AFP and iSCSI. No Credit card or Azure Subscription required but the environment is available for 1 hour from the time you enter the test drive.
- Try out SoftNAS for free on Azure.
- Try out SoftNAS for free on AWS.
Both trials allow you to install, configure and use SoftNAS as if you were running in a production environment and explore the product for multiple weeks. - Purchase: You can purchase SoftNAS on the Azure or AWS Marketplaces. We offer various capacities and performance levels for fast time to production. Discounted larger deployments up to many petabytes, are available via a BYOL (Bring Your Own License) obtained by contacting the SoftNAS Sales team or an authorized reselling partner.
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