Excited about Veeam V8 yet? If you’re a Data Domain customer you should be!

Well before you get too excited let me start by saying, I don’t have any screenshots or cool hands on stuff (yet!). But with that said I am pretty excited about the upcoming release and some of the cool new stuff in store. Before we get to the Data Domain integration lets talk about some of the other cool new stuff you can expect to see in V8.

New Features:

  • Snapshot Integration with NetApp
  • Replication from backup files – With v8 you will be able to choose where the replication jobs obtain VM data from. In addition to production storage, you can now replicate from your backup files. No longer do you have to touch your production environment twice ―thus reducing the impact of data protection activities on your production storage in half.
  • WAN acceleration now works for replication jobs (not just copy jobs)!
  • DR Automation – The next version of Veeam will have the ability to plan out some of your DR steps and then help you execute them.

Full list is here: http://www.veeam.com/blog/v8-feature-announcements-major-replication-enhancements.html

Probably one of the most exciting features for me, is the Data Domain Boost integration. I’ve been working with Data Domain for a while and DDBoost has always proven to be awesome… if your backup application supported it, so the news that my favorite backup platform was going to start supporting it was pretty awesome!

Before I get into how Veeam plans to integrate with DDBoost, you might be asking what is DD Boost… Data Domain Boost, or DD Boost as most call it, is a plugin to a backup application that runs on your backup server. It then offloads part of the deduplication and compression process from the CPU and Memory of the Data Domain and puts it on to the CPU and Memory of your backup servers. This allows the Data Domain to focus on storing data and not get bothered with compression and segment uniqueness processes. (There are also some enhancements that make the backup app aware of DD replication, but I’m not sure if Veeam will be using that or not)

EMC has a short YouTube video that is also helpful here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0vKfAcIve4

So how will Veeam leverage DD Boost ?

Well traditionally if you have a Data Domain and using Veeam you are told to turn off and turn compression down. This takes a lot of CPU and memory load off of your Veeam servers. The problem is that it then puts it on the Data Domain, which can lead to very slow backup and restore times because of an overworked Data Domain system. The only real solution was to purchase a Data Domain with a larger CPU so that it could handle the load. However now that Veeam will integrate with DD Boost we can put that load onto a Veeam server instead. Because Veeam Servers can be run along side your other virtual machines (typically at night) when other systems are not in use…. you can really maximize your investment in Data Domain along with Veeam! (and even your shiny new VMware hosts 🙂 )

Like I said before though… I haven’t been lucky enough to get a hold of any V8 beta code so no pretty screenshots from me. However I was able to find the following PDF done by Rick at Veeam who walks you through the process of setting up the new Data Domain Boost stuff.

http://www.veeam.com/wp-configuring-emc-data-domain-boost-with-veeam-availability-suite-v8.html

 

Enjoy!

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One Response to "Excited about Veeam V8 yet? If you’re a Data Domain customer you should be!"

  1. Have you had any luck backing up with ddboost. Every time I run a backup it takes 53 hours for 400 VMs and about 20 TB of nfs Netapp storage. Bottleneck shows source. Not sure if you have better results or not.

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