Copying Backups Offsite & Other Questions

[Garry]

Hello,

My company currently uses HP Dataprotector to back up each of our servers to tape. We're looking to implement a more modern, suitable solution and have trialled Veeam Backup and Replication. We are struggling, however, to replicate some of the functionality we're seeing in BackupExec and I hope you can tell me what I need to do.

Question 1
We intend to back up our VMware vSphere 5 environment to disk (iSCSI LUN attached to the Veeam server) on a nightly basis. I have been asked, however, to ensure that our backed up data is also stored at Amazon on either S3 storage or within an EC2 virtual machine. If you're not familiar with Amazon Web Services, you can simply think of this as a remote datacentre.

Bearing in my things like bandwidth and deduplication what is the best way to achieve this? We would like the ability to do, if it ever becomes necessary, single-file restore from the remote copy of our backups. We would also like to be able to extract individual virtual machines' VMX and VMDK files so they can be imported into EC2 and booted.

Using BackupExec we would set up a Media Server locally, with the CASO option installed. We'd set up a second media server in the Amazon Cloud and use the optimized duplication feature to replicate our backups across.

Question 2
Given that Veeam B&R does not (yet?) support tape drives what is our best value option for long-term (up to five years) data archival and what would the process of restoring from such backups look like?

Question 3
Does Veeam B&R support NDMP in any form and, if so, can we still do single-file restores when utilising it?

Question 4
How does Veeam handle raw device mappings within virtual machines?

Thanks for your comments.

[dellock6]

Hi Garry,
I did extensive tests on AWS as a possible solutions for remote backups, and it works great, are you thinking about the Amazon EC2 import tool for the restore process? Never thought about it but I think it could work, maybe a long process from start to finish. About S3, it's cheaper but it's an object storage, you can use it at best for offsite repository for long-term retention. Restoring from here is somethng even harder then EC2. One important thing, remember to install repository role in the remote VM, and use a fair decent instance type, at least the medium with 2 vCPU. Oh, and of course an EBS disk, not the ephemeral one

Do not know what NDMP is. About RDM, you can backup them if they are in virtual mode, since you need to snapshot them for backing them up.

Luca.

[dellock6]

Oh, and an additional consideration: AWS prices you also for the traffic you create, and it's not flat but per/Gb. If offsite backups are going to create high traffic, probably AWS will costs you more than other solutions. I have nothing against Amazon, but consider also other providers where maybe you can get a flat price for bandwidth. At the end you simply need a remote windows VM with a fair amount of disk...

Luca.

[Gostev]

We don't support NDMP.