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CDP – Continous Data Protection

Anthony Spiteri kicks off the third and last day of the Vanguard Summit in Prague with CDP. It’s all about the filter driver. There are many competitors out which put their CDP solution out, but some of them still have issues sometimes, like pink screens of death when on the ESXi hosts. Veeam worked closely with VMware to get the stuff done right. Because when you’re going into the I/O stack with a data protection solution, you have to be sure what you’re doing.

CDP is a VMware-only available solution, there is no CDP for Hyper-V, at least not currently. That might change, but not soon. In Veeam you can leverage the usage of VMware tags for your data protection. You create backup jobs that will use these tags, and depending on these tags you’re able to protect your workloads with the needed RPO / RTO.

When you set up DCP in Veeam, Veeam will install the filter driver on a cluster base. You can’t install it on the host manually, Veeam does that for you but on a cluster base. With Veeam CDP there is an RPO as low as 15 seconds possible. For a restore, you can go back to either a restore point or go back with a slider to a specific point in time.

Write for us

Ilya Afanasyev is telling us more about the Veeam engagement in regards to a program for writers. It is called “Write for us” and it is not restricted to Vanguards only but all other tech people can take part in it. You chose a topic and apply for the program. Veeam will approve the topic (or maybe not) and then it’s your turn to create a draft. If the draft gets approved, your blog post gets published on the Veeam blog and you’ll get a revenue. A blog post brings you 200$ and a white paper is worth about 1000$.

If you’re interested to write some cool blog posts or even a white paper, then visit the “Write for us” program on the Veeam website for more information.

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Containers and Veeam

David Hill introduces us to the topic of containers, and how Veeam can handle that. Containers make it possible to use less different operating systems. Today you’ve got patches and updates to install on your operating system, no matter if it’s Linux or Windows. With containers, it becomes a lot simpler.

It’s all about buzzwords. Being or getting cloud-ready, being cloud-native, and being it now. A few years ago it was the same with the cloud. Cloud did help to solve some problems, but some problems are still the same, just on a bigger scale. The same for containers. They will help to solve some problems, but some problems will still be problems, just on a different scale.

David explained some things about the statefulness of a container. Containers are good when they are used for what they are thought. But having just any kind of application containerized doesn’t work. When an application fails, and the container management spins up a new instance of that application, the application itself doesn’t know what happened. If you click save in WordPress for example, WordPress doesn’t know what you did before when the application crashed in the backend.

Cloud Tier

Andrew Zhelezko and David Hill are talking about the Cloud Tier. In Veeam, you can set up and define multiple types of backup repositories. You can have local disk storage, NAS, deduplication appliances, etc. You can even combine them in a Scale-out Repository. Now with the latest VBR version you’re even able to scale-out to the cloud with the usage of object storage. You’ve got nearly unlimited storage available in the cloud to store your backups. And in Veeam, that’s all policy-driven. Depending on your policy, Veeam does the automatic cloud-tiering to the object storage of your choice. And you can put that object storage also into a Scale-out Repository as a capacity tier.

That means that you might have some backups local, maybe because of compliance reasons or to meet a certain RPO/RTO time. Everything which is older than a specified time will be tiered out to the object storage.

A new feature is the Immutability of your backup files in the object storage. That means that you can lock the backups which are moved out to the cloud. That gives you protection against rogue admins or to have a certain level of compliance. No one can delete your backup files on the cloud storage. You can set the lock for a specific time, and during this time the backup files can’t be deleted. These settings have to be set on a specific S3 bucket.

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Welcome Vanguards!

Nikola Pejkova and Rick Vanover welcome all new and renewed Vanguards here at Prague. As we know it from last year, and maybe also from other conferences, there are the famous traffic light signals. In the following days we will see and hear much of green, yellow and red stuff, which means that they are free to publish, embargoed (publish it somewhen) or even under NDA (don’t even think to publish it or talk about it).

Rick and Nikola explained some new things about the Vanguard program to us. Veeam likes to have more engagement with the Vanguards. There will be more recap movies like they did at VeeamON, helping to build up the profile of a Vanguard, not promoting Veeam especially. Rick guides us through the agenda. There are two rooms this year, with even more sessions for all kinds of tastes of technology and interests. For the official Vanguard Dinner on Tuesday we will have our own Veeam shuttles from the hotel to the venue and back. Awesome!

Rick shares some more program updates and priorities. Such an event, and also the Vanguard program is a great opportunity to get more information directly from the source. As a Vanguard, you’re also able to give your feedback directly to the responsible persons, like feedback for beta versions, or the program itself. These persons can push it into the right channels to make it probably happen.

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