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Veeam Software announced its Availability Suite v9 would include a storage capability called Unlimited Scale-out Backup Repository that is designed to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of backup storage.
Enterprises can now increase capacity infinitely by adding almost any backup device, and there is no need to manage each device individually, though IT can optimize the pool to send data that needs to be accessed more rapidly to higher-end storage, and less critical data to less expensive devices.
“Backup is not sufficient anymore,” Doug Hazelman, vice president of product strategy at Veeam, told eWEEK. “Today’s organizations need to provide data center availability, because their customers, employees and partners expect their company to be always-on, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
He said the Unlimited Scale-Out Backup Repository is aimed primarily at large enterprises that desperately need relief from managing their large, complex backup storage systems.
“This capability enables IT to radically simplify backup management, because adding capacity is as easy as adding just about any storage device to the pool,” Hazelman explained. “It also substantially reduces the total cost of ownership whereas Veeam increases capacity by 30 percent just by freeing up resources that go unused in legacy systems.”
Using the backup files placement policy, full and incremental backup files can be assigned to separate storage devices for improved synthetic full backup creation and transformation performance.
“Today, customers, employees and partners expect continuous access to information and applications at any time and from any device, with no tolerance for downtime or data loss,” Hazelman said. “Achieving the always-on business has previously required an expensive investment in fully redundant failover systems, so the vast majority of workloads are protected by lower-end systems that have RPOs and RTOs of several hours or days.”
The platform also increases the capacity of existing storage by as much as 30 percent because it frees up space that typically goes unused in a legacy backup storage environment.
“The conversation is rapidly switching from backup to availability–after all, availability is what businesses really need,” Hazelman said. “A backup stored somewhere in a vault is no help to a company when it takes hours or days to restore a mission-critical application; they’ll never get back the time and money lost during the downtime. As a result, backup is no longer enough.”
He explained organizations will be looking to solutions that leverage different technologies such as storage, cloud and virtualization that go beyond mere backup and, instead, ensure that the data center will never experience more than a few minutes of downtime.