Falling in Love with Veeam Backup & Replication v12

Veeam announced the pending general availability of Veeam Backup & Replication v12. Here, we unpack the announcement and what’s in store for Pure customers and sales partners.

Veeam

4 minutes
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The need for enhanced cyber resiliency is the new normal for IT organizations across the world. With many organizations experiencing at least one attempted ransomware attack, secure immutability and reliable recovery is absolutely essential. But Enterprise backup is often complex and costly due to legacy practices. 

With Pure Storage® and Veeam Backup & Replication v12, choosing the right storage for highly-efficient, enterprise-grade recovery is easy. Providing capabilities for all workloads, we provide greater cyber security protection and operational efficiencies that allow you to protect more and recover faster in the face of disaster or cyber-attack. Let’s take a look.

Enhanced Orchestration and Management for Snapshots and Replicas 

Thanks to the collaboration and joint engineering between Pure and Veeam, automating snapshots and backups has been a breeze for Pure customers using Veeam for several years.  

Released in 2018, the Pure Plug-In for Veeam (USAPI) has been the #1 downloaded tool for Veeam Backup & Replication—and for good reason. USAPI helps lower RPOs by allowing Pure FlashArray™ customers to automate snapshots and backups. 

The USAPI 2.0 plug-in for Veeam allows snapshots and replicas to be managed, cataloged, and backed up to FlashArray//X, FlashArray//C, or Pure Cloud Block Store™. USAPI 2.0 also enhances enterprise scalability and offsite resiliency by replicating snapshots from FlashArray//X or FlashArray//XL to FlashArray//C, giving Pure customers the ability to deploy Backup & Replication v12 into more complex environments.  

The USAPI 2.0 plug-in for Pure is available for download free of charge from the Veeam website. If you’re a FlashArray customer using or considering Veeam, you won’t want to be without this great new tool (did I mention it’s free?). 

Direct to Object Support for S3

The release of Veeam v12 brings Direct to Object support that enables Veeam to leverage the parallelism of the all-flash scale-out architecture of FlashBlade//S®. Rapid Restore, part of Pure FlashBlade systems, offers superior, petabyte-scale data-recovery performance that is further enhanced by Veeam Backup & Replication v12. 

Veeam v12 also provides direct to object backup capabilities that help customers achieve recovery-time and recovery-point objectives (RTO/RPO) for mission-critical applications while reducing complexity and risk while simplifying deployment and configuration tasks. 

Pure and Veeam v12 take full advantage of the inherent security and unlimited scalability of object storage with support for S3 Object Lock technology. Object Lock prevents objects from being deleted or overwritten for a defined period of time. Using Object Lock technology with FlashBlade means backup objects become immutable as soon as they are written. 

Added Ransomware Protection with SafeMode

With ransomware attacks expected to occur every two seconds by 2031, it’s no surprise that thwarting attacks remains a critical priority for organizations. In fact, a recent ESG ransomware study showed 87% of organizations are concerned their data backups could become infected or corrupted by a ransomware attack.

Immutable and indestructible Pure SafeMode™ Snapshots for FlashBlade and FlashArray ensure your data is safe from disasters and ransomware attacks. SafeMode Snapshots enable you to create secure read-only snapshots of backup data and associated metadata catalogs. In the event your backups are compromised by a disaster or a ransomware attack, you can easily use a SafeMode snapshot in conjunction with Veeam DataLabs to power on your mission-critical applications and keep your business running. 

Pure Services can help you ensure you’ve implemented these features with the recommended practices so that SafeMode and your data backups are ready when needed. 

Additional Use Cases

Veeam Backup & Replication provides availability for data and applications by backing up file data from native FlashArray™ storage snapshots, making FlashArray//C an ideal choice to keep snapshots for long-term storage. Just configure FlashArray//C as a secondary repository for redundancy or create policies for different retention times and configure Veeam to copy backups from FlashArray//X to FlashArray//C for increased fault tolerance and enterprise scalability.

FlashArray snapshots can also be used to create an isolated, on-demand test environment in Veeam DataLabs, allowing you to leverage copies of production workloads for testing and development, analytics and security, and to drive business change. 

FlashArray//C is simple to set up and provides native support for NFS and SMB protocols, eliminating the complexity and cost of running two environments. And Pure Services can help ensure that you get these business case benefits quickly and completely. 

Maximize Value and Reduce Risks with Pure Professional Services

IT and legacy data environments are complex, causing delays and workarounds for implementing solutions. The success of your business case depends on migrating to the Pure environment quickly and efficiently.

The Pure Professional Services team has experience with migrating old legacy environments to a more efficient Pure environment. They have the skills, tools, and expertise to ensure that you achieve the goals of your business case as quickly as possible. They also have specific services targeted at data recovery, SafeMode, and Veeam. Be sure to consider whether using Pure Professional Services to migrate to the new environment makes sense for your business. 

Download our Solution Brief to learn how Veeam v12 and USAPI 2.0 can simplify orchestrating FlashArray snapshots