HP StoreVirtual 4530, VSphere 5.5 and Veeam. A good combo?

[bladd]

Hello,

We currently backup about 7TB from an EMC VNXe 3100. We're ready to get another storage device, and since I'm in the market, I'd really like to be able to take advantage of the SAN snapshot backups with HP. I've never really had any problems with the VNXe, the main reason for getting a new storage system is to put the other one on standby/light duty and be able to go back to production in case the main SAN totally failed.

Just for reference, backing up about 15 servers from VMWare nightly, almost all Win2k8R2. Average machine is 3-400GB. Backing up to a couple Thecus and Synology NASs with 7200k drives on a Gig LAN. Sending offsite using WAN acceleration (not too thrilled with that so far)

Would like to take more frequent backups, but VMWare snapshot process causes some machines to occasionally freeze up for a few seconds, dropping all connections.

So for anybody that has experience:

- Would you consider the ability to take backups from SAN snapshots with Veeam a major bonus? Worthy of changing storage provider to enable it?
- Would you consider a StoreVirtual 4530 an upgrade from a VNXe 3100? The VNXe has redundant power, storage processors and NICs and a pretty simple interface. Don't want to trade functionality/redundancy just to get SAN snapshot backups.
- Are SAN snapshot backups necessarily any bigger or smaller than hotadd backups for example?
- Any other thoughts on best practice or angles I'm not looking at for our situation.

Thanks everybody!

[foggy]

- Would you consider the ability to take backups from SAN snapshots with Veeam a major bonus? Worthy of changing storage provider to enable it?

Backup from SAN snapshots will definitely improve your RPOs and reduce impact backup operation puts on the production environment.

- Are SAN snapshot backups necessarily any bigger or smaller than hotadd backups for example?

No, backup size does not depend on the backup method.

[Gostev]

dellock6 runs big StoreVirtual (aka LeftHand) cluster, and particularly loves the integration between Veeam and HP.

He even allowed me to quote him for my VMworld 2013 presentation:

After 3 days of backup runs I should say it: @veeam VBR7 + parallel processing + SAN snapshots is deadly combination

[bladd]

Pardon my ignorance, what does he mean by parallel processing?

[Gostev]

http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/70/v ... ssing.html

[dellock6]

10 nodes at the moment, we would probably start splitting the cluster once over 12 machines.
We are running the VSA version to be honest, is more flexible since you can design your own storage and install the software on top of it, last time I used the physical version was a 4500 two years ago at a customer. Just check the new models coming out with hybrid storage (SSD + HDD) and the tiering features of the 11.0 version (called adaptive optimization by HP guys), don't know the new model names.

Or if you need to only buy disk-based StoreVirtual, get the 4530 but check prices right because new models are coming out.

Luca.