Integration with Storage Snapshots : Vendor Roadmap

[MichaelCade]

John whilst I hear your points, could we maybe explore this topic further around the features you feel you are missing or is it due to performance impact and reducing the vSphere VM snapshot life span?

The universal storage API is new for us at Veeam so we are unable to deliver this or make it open for all, also due to the process of once the vendor has completed the integration with the API it needs to go through our QC channels before being released to the public. This may seem like a bottleneck but this is to ensure our customers have the best possible experience with their integrations.

If it is performance related then I myself would be more than happy to assist with your configuration to ensure it is configured to best practices.

[foggy]

Only a month after releasing the first third-party storage plug-in for Veeam B&R and today we announce availability of the next one!

Pure Storage Plug-In for Veeam Backup & Replication is already available for download.

And we're not going to stop here. Stay tuned!

[Goodmanr0732]

Is there any integration planed for EMC VMAX storage arrays?

[foggy]

Hi Ryan, unfortunately, we do not share our plans prior to official announcements.

[jhouse]

Gostev I answered you on this and no responce then I must be right?

[Gostev]

Hi John, actually you did not answer my two very specific questions - your response was totally unrelated. To me, this was an indication that you didn't have good answers proving your previous points, and thus were trying to change the conversation completely. This is why I didn't respond. Thanks!

[csydas]

Gostev I answered you on this and no responce then I must be right?

Let's try to keep the conversation a bit above reddit level debate...

What is your big deal with Tegile, John? Or better yet, the big deal with rushing out the integration?

Just from my point of view with IT, I've been doing it for a long time, and I want to see things done slowly and deliberately. I deplore what Facebook, Google, and other modern tech companies have done with their stupid idea of "move fast and break things" because all that happens is that shit breaks and the company washes their hands of it because they've already moved on to the next big thing. Rolling Release is untested release, and while it's cool to be able to feed features at a rapid rate for trivial applications, a Web Browser is a completely different beast than a Hypervisor, and that means a different beast than a Hypervisor backup. If your Web Browser renders stuff a little off or hijacks scrolling, in the end you just have a poor user experience, not a data corrupting catastrophe.

With all due respect to Veeam's RnD, we've seen what happens when stuff gets rushed out the door from Veeam, and it isn't pretty. The last thing I want is rapid releases of Storage Integration without proven experience and history behind it. If my team were running Infinidat or Pure, we'd be testing the hell out of it for months before relying on it for production backups. I don't care about what Veeam's RnD can do for the 40m, I care what their marathon looks like. I wanna see what their software looks like after 100,000 backups and 1,000,000 restores. I wanna see what headaches the IT community as a whole ran into during testing (or those bold enough to install and go straight away with production). I don't care if it takes them a year or a decade, I just want to know that the last thing I have to worry about when my production goes down is whether or not the backup software is gonna work right.

From my point of view, these storage plugin's are pretty new territory for the Veeam guys, so it makes sense that they wanna take things slow at first, especially since Netapp, EMC, et. al. all have the weight of monolithic companies behind them to force non-standard practices in their hardware/software. I certainly hope that Veeam resists the urge to start crapping out plug-ins just to meet sales promises, cause that more than anything would make me lose faith in the company.

[serkantek]

Are you utilizing NAS device as a production datastore?

Yes, Qnap Enterprise Storage is being used in our environment for a couple of production servers. Most of our production workloads are on IBM v7000 Gen 2 which is working perfectly with Veeam storage snapshots.

[ProdigyNB]

The universal storage API is new for us at Veeam so we are unable to deliver this or make it open for all, also due to the process of once the vendor has completed the integration with the API it needs to go through our QC channels before being released to the public. This may seem like a bottleneck but this is to ensure our customers have the best possible experience with their integrations.

Throwing my 2c in here - the obvious solution is to make storage vendors responsible for supporting their integrations, making the integration API a public and open document, and then having the QC process available as a certification process to make the integrations available via Veeam itself. Running uncertified integrations would then have flow on effect with regard to support agreements.

So for example, Pure Storage has gone through the QC process, so it's available as a fully supported integration via Veeam's site.

Lets say however, Tegile wants to get their integration module out there faster. It can use the published API to build its own integration, available direct from Tegile. Any support for that integration module would then be provided from Tegile and if Veeam needed to provide support for an environment where the Tegile integration was installed, it could require the Tegile module removed and the problem to be reproduced on a "stock" system to continue with the support ticket.
Later on, when Veeam has the available resources, and Tegile has the funds and time, the QC process can be invoked to produce a Veeam-approved-and-supported version of the integration plugin. Tegile may then choose to work purely through the Veeam program or have a two-stream approach where there's a "bleeding edge" Tegile integration module and a fully supported but somewhat lagged behind Veeam approved version.

This would also permit smaller, F/OSS storage systems (or even in-house custom storage solutions) to develop/release their own integrations for Veeam. The number of vendors supporting Veeam would then be greater, and this would help drive Veeam sales. Having open integration specs will also increase goodwill in the communities around those storage systems.

Let people make their own decisions about whether to sacrifice full Veeam support for better integration, and Veeam will ultimately reap the rewards.

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi Prodigy,

thanks for the feedback.

Beside some legal issues related to patented technology and support statements, our experience in the past showed clearly that we can not open up this program to a public available API.
1) As all storage systems are pretty unique, we sometimes need to change some things on our side for the vendor.
2) There is a lot room for interpretation in some of the scenarios and our QA team has huge experience in finding the corner cases that our customer would face later. You can not expect to write down this experience into a paper and expect that the outcome would have the same quality.
3) It is our reputation that would be affected when something is not working as expected. You could be easily only face the issue when something broke and you need an restore from a non working restore point.
4) The interaction with the vendors related to dev/qa questions, demos, documentation, marketing is huge and we can scale only to a specific extend.

That said we will continue with nearly same release speed this year and several vendors/storages are on their way in different stages.
We increased our Storage integration rate with this project by several times and continue with it.

... and we will not stop there and increase the value for our customers over time with additional functionality in a way that it would not be possible at a public API.

[jhouse]

I think the issue right now is for Veeam never put together software that excludes other Hardware Storage Vendors (Tegile) if they want to remain hardware neutral. It causes them to play favorites which is not the way to remain hardware neutral as they can see it has caused them a lot of pain.

[Andreas Neufert]

I see your point and we are doing something against this. As said, we released in the past one vendor integration per year. Now we will end up with 5-10 per year, which is a huge acceleration.

To not open the SDK/API public has legal and quality reasons (see above). Mainly the quality ones block us from doing it, as customer satisfaction is top priority for us.

But anyway if you look at the acceleration, we will have all the big and small vendors covered within a foreseeable time frame.

[sirijusdailidonis]

+1 for Storage integration with Huawei OceanStore 5xxx and 6800

[dharenkamp]

Is there anything planned to support NetApp volumes with Snapmirror / Snapvault that are not used for VMs like CIFS or NFS Volumes?
If not -> this is a feature request

[Andreas Neufert]

thx ... noted... Can you please describe the scenario ... what functionality do you request? For which type of data?

[Giacomo_N]

Hi all, any news on Nutanix-VMware integration? I remember some announcements from Veeam co-CEO last year for the support coming by the end of 2017 for AHV, but probably somethings go wrong:
http://www.channelbuzz.ca/2017/06/nutan ... hip-22014/

[Gostev]

Hi Giacomo, integration with Nutanix on VMware was never announced.

[Giacomo_N]

Hi Gostev, I know, was my hope after the announcement last year with this increase partnership, talking with a Nutanix salesman the 90% of the Nutanix installation are on Vmware.
As today no Vmware or AHV integration are available, any plan or "tier" level for Nutanix?
Thank you for the reply and have a good day!

[Andreas Neufert]

Nutanix for VMware Snapshot integration is in the list and is part of the selection process. Like the others mentioned above.

There is a global rule and written in the contracts that we do not comment about future release integrations.

[Giacomo_N]

Thank you Andreas for the reply, I keep my hope alive

[dharenkamp]

thx ... noted... Can you please describe the scenario ... what functionality do you request? For which type of data?

Yes. In most NetApp Systems the storage is used for CIFS and NFS Exports to clients.
A functionality to control snapshots and snapshot transfers with Snapmirror / Snapvault should be there.
In other backup software it is called "NAS client"...
Actual Veeam can only trigger snapshots on volumes that are uses as VM Datastore.
Actually if you want to use veeam with NetApp you have to configure NAS Backups on NetApp storage directly or use Windows File Servers

If there is a option to backup the NAS Volumes we will have a single pane glass for all backups

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi Daniel,

thank you for the feedback.
We already have announced that we will release a NAS backup tool (CIFS/NFS) in the future (we do not comment about release times sorry). You can backup unstructured data with it.

[dharenkamp]

I know already about NAS Backups. But these NAS Backups are getting data direct from CIFS / NFS and will copy them to a repository.
So these backups are not comparable with storage integration.

[andrewyager]

I know it has been discussed on and off for years, but we would love to sell DellEMC SC series integratio . The REST API for Snapshot, system and volume handling is publically available and includes he ability to map iSCSI luns, add new tagets and all the things we think Veeam would need. The same API also stretches to a number of other Dell storage platforms.

[Gostev]

Hi Andrew, DellEMC has access to Universal Storage API and they have plans to integrate some of their storage devices with us. On the other hand, as you may have heard a couple of weeks ago they announced "primary storage portfolio optimization" so we cannot know what product lines will survive down the road... but it is safe to say they are unlikely to build integration for discontinued product lines. This is not to imply SC is one of them, I actually have no clue about that yet. Thanks!

[MKiefer@Leitwerk.de]

+1 for Storage integration with DataCore SANsymphony

[tscherrer]

+1 for Storage integration with DataCore SANsymphony

We need Storage integration with DataCore SANsymphony for many customers.

[obengert]

+1 for Storage integration with DataCore SANsymphony

[Gostev]

Since you guys are all from the same company, we will consider that as a single vote

[cerberus]

+1 for Storage integration with Dell Compellent SC5020 Storage Array