LucidLink DR using Veeam

[TDG]

We use https://www.lucidlink.com/ & they had a massive outage 2 months ago which lasted 2 days

This is what LucidLink says re: Business Continuity planning, backup and Disaster Recovery with LucidLink Filespaces
https://support.lucidlink.com/hc/en-us/ ... -Filespace

Failover from backups can be architected in different ways. For example, one could take backups of their LucidLink Filespace every 4 hours using Veeam. The backup data is written to local storage. In the event of a disaster, one could restore the critical data from the Veeam backup to a Windows file server, assign permissions accordingly on that Windows File Server for the restored data and let users begin accessing the file server via the LAN in the office and VPN remotely.

Install one of this hardware appliance with required capacity on prem and use Veeam backup to backup LucidLink file space
https://objectfirst.com/?whitepaper=longc
or
Install a big enough harden Veeam Linux repository and do the same

Because this is local it will be faster backup/restore then using a S3 provides like Wasabi, AWS, BackBlaze etc..

I like some advise please

[david.domask]

Hi TDG,

If I'm understanding correctly, the question is which is preferable for an Unstructured Data Backup: a Veeam Hardened Repository or an Object Storage repository.

The answer here is "it depends" on the performance of the backing storage and your comfort in managing the system.

Looking at the LucidLink site, it looks like they advise attaching the LucidLink share to a Windows server via a UNC path -- I have some concerns on an SMB share potentially going over WAN here, so first it would be important to have a proxy as "close" to the share as possible to avoid SMB network interruptions as much as is feasible.

ObjectFirst has its own Veeam Ready page which can help you understand what was tested and working, and any supported Linux distribution on a server that meets the system requirements for a repository server and the number of concurrent tasks you will be processing should work quite fine, it's mostly a matter of your comfort here.

Are there maybe specific elements between a Hardened Repository and an Object Storage repository you're wanting clarification on?

A side note on the recovery narrative mentioned by LucidLink, don't forget that in a true disaster, you can have a protected share live instantly with Instant File Share Recovery, which is built for that exact scenario.

[TDG]

Thanks David. Instant file share recovery is interesting but we have approx. 40TB of data mostly Adobe CC files for the designers. What sort of speed we are looking here ?

[david.domask]

Hi TDG,

You're very welcome -- regarding speeds, as with all things it will depend on a lot of factors outside of Veeam so I'm not really comfortable with specific numbers since the environments I've seen will undoubtedly differ from yours.

What I can tell is that it works pretty much as advertised, and it's going to be gated by basically the same limits any other network share would be, so the server needs to be sized appropriately to handle the workload and the incoming connections from clients. A dedicated mount server may make sense if it's expected that a large number of users will need to be accessing the share and can be chosen during the Instant File Share Recovery Wizard.

[TDG]

Thanks it's interesting I will do some testing. Also I guess this will help other LucidLink users (Think most of them have a local NAS with a copy of the forespace in the event of an outage)
& Maybe LucidLink can update the DR docs

Cheers & keep up the good work