Copy Data management?

[ARycroft]

Hi,

We have a client who is looking to optimise their Copy Data Management, and particularly in their development environment with the refreshing of the QA data from Production. Currently they use Backup/Restore processes but it takes a long time. Are there any references/whitepapers on how Veeam can best be utilised to provide Copy Data Management other than doing a Backup/Restore?

Kind regards
Andrew Rycroft

[Andreas Neufert]

There are many internal and 3rd party options (orchestration) available. What is the database environment, what it the primary storage vendor/product line used, is it VMware, has the QA system access to the storage and do it run on the same VMware environment,...? Please share some more details.

[ARycroft]

Thank you for your reply,

We are currently trying to evaluate the most suitable architecture going forward. The environment is 100% virtualised on VMware. Currently there is separate storage and a separate VMware cluster for development and production. The storage vendor could be anyone going forward. The main database currently is MS SQL, but other databases maybe used for other applications. Copy data management is a requirement for the efficient operation of our application development. We are currently implementing Veeam Premium for backups.

Any input appreciated.

Kind regards
Andrew Rycroft

[Andreas Neufert]

There are many options.

SQL Plug-in backups.
- You can script the restore on a secondary server.
VMware Image Level Backup.
- You can instant restore a disk with the SQL database to the secondary system and run it from backup (maybe only suitable for short test) then hang in the SQL database file into the SQL server.
- You can do the same from a storage snapshot (with our storage snapshot processing). This gives you ultimate performance of your production storage for it.
- Use the virtual lab to start the whole server in a development environment. (Network sandbox environment).
- Use any kind of SQL restore with automation.

All the above you can automate.
I am not aware of any 3rd party tools that did copy data management for SQL with Veeam, but you can usually use any of them that can start a specific (restore/instant recovery) script.