Data everywhere is growing at unprecedented rates, yet many backup environments remain unchanged and unable to meet the new demanding recovery requirements. A fast, reliable, simple, and flash-enabled form of data backup and recovery—at scale—is more critical than ever.
With Veeam and Pure Storage® FlashArray//C60, now you have the ability to restore VMware virtual machines with rates as high as 10GB/s provided that you have the right source to write the data back.
Veeam is the most simplified VMware backup solution. In just 10 minutes, you can start backing up your VMware application to Pure Storage FlashArray//C60. This blog post will showcase the value of backing up pivotal virtual machines to FlashArray//C™ so that in case of a disaster, you have the path to recover the virtual machines with a speed of up to 36TB/hr.
The following architecture shows the test bed that was created to run the test for 24 virtual machines (VMs) hosted on six ESXi servers installed with version 6.7.1.
Figure 1: Reference architecture using Veeam and Pure Storage FlashArray//C60 for a VMware backup solution.
Each ESXi host is comprised of two NVMe storage systems, and two separate datastores are created to have the test VMs. To test the extent of the storage capabilities of backup and restore in terms of performance, each virtual machine is configured with a 100GB logical disk and fully populated with all unique data sets, i.e., non-dedupe data and non-compressible.
A Veeam backup job is created on the Veeam backup server installed with version 11, and 24 virtual machines are added to perform the full backup with the storage snapshot option selected in the advanced settings. A full backup of the virtual machine can drive up to as high as 3.5GB/s of backup rates. After the backup is successful, a full restore of all 24 virtual machines is triggered from the Veeam backup and recovery server at the same time. As shown in the graphs below, the restore rates were observed to peak at up to 10.7GB/s which converts to 36TB/hr of restore rates.
Figure 2: Restore rates using the Veeam backup and recovery server.
What’s Next
I strongly recommend leveraging Veeam solutions with Pure Storage FlashArray//C as a backup target. It provides three times faster recovery than any disk-based backup appliance. Moreover, if you’re using Pure Storage FlashArray for primary workloads, you can leverage Veeam even better. With Veeam 12 Universal storage integration with Pure Storage, you can perform the volume snapshots for short-term recovery, and you can back up those snapshots to Veeam repositories over FlashArray//C for long-term retention and faster recovery in case of disaster scenarios.
For more information on Veeam and Pure Storage solutions, reach out to the Pure solutions team or visit the Pure Storage and Veeam solutions page.
