Recently Pure and Veeam jointly announced the release of the Pure Storage plug-in and support for FlashBlade with Veeam Backup & Replication. These integrations provide joint customers with enhanced data protection capabilities that included accelerated backups, rapid data and application recovery, and agile data management.
Both Veeam & Pure Storage have been recognized by their customers for delivering outstanding customer satisfaction with Net Promoter Scores of 73 & 83.7 respectively. This is the bar both looked to build upon with our integration efforts.
The Benefits of Pure Storage Integration with Veeam include:
Agent-less, application consistent array-based snapshot backups
Veeam coordinates the execution of API calls to the hypervisor and guest OS, via interfaces like VMware vSphere Storage APIs and Microsoft Volume Shadow Service APIs, eliminating the need for agents to be installed in the VMs. This process ensures applications and file systems are preserved in a consistent state prior to the creation of the FlashArray snapshot. This ensures data consistency which provides faster recovery times for VMs and greater recovery options with database applications.
Reduces the performance impact of VMware vSphere backups
All vSphere host-based backups require production VMs to operate in a backup state for the duration of the backup operation – regardless of array integration. Depending on the size of the datastore and rate of change, this process may last hours, during which VMs and applications can experience performance penalties. This is due to the of the hypervisor’s underlying snapshot architecture, which introduces IO amplification due to the redirection of writes and the replay of a per-VM SCSI transaction log when the backup process completes. VM performance degrades in correlation to the amount of IO activity during the backup window, meaning IO demanding applications suffer the most. By integrating FlashArray snapshots VMs are in and out of hypervisor backup state in seconds or minutes, negating performance issues and offloading processes like data copying and indexing to the snapshot copy.
Rapid, granular recovery of VMs, virtual disks and files with Veeam Explorer™ for Storage Snapshots
Customers can recover individual files, directories, virtual disks or entire VMs quickly and efficiently directly from Pure Storage snapshots for significantly reduced RTOs.
Easy access to production data copies with Veeam DataLabs™(formerly known as Veeam Virtual Labs)
With the Pure plug-in, customers can create instant, on-demand isolated test environments based on FlashArray Snapshots. Customers are able to leverage copies of a production workload for testing and development, analytics, and security to drive business change. The cloning of existing VMs requires no additional storage and only consumes capacity as new, unique data is written to the cloned data set. The cloned environments enjoy the performance benefits of all-flash storage and Purity’s Automatic QoS in Purity protects production workloads from IO intensive VM clones (aka noisy-neighbors).
Accelerated Backups with Rapid Recovery of VMs, datastores and large application data sets
Veeam supports FlashBlade™ as an all-flash Veeam Ready Repository. This architecture option dramatically reduces data restoration times for large data sets and critical applications. We’ve seen large databases that previously required days from days to restore from disk-based arrays to recover in mere minutes. Rapid Restore is quickly becoming a requirement as private clouds and service providers are supporting ever increasing data set capacities.
Pure Storage and Veeam Integration Details and Notes:
Pure is the 2nd Veeam technology alliance partner to release a storage plug-in based on the new Universal Adapter APIs. Prior to the Universal Adapter, storage array integrations / plug-ins were developed by Veeam engineering. By developing the Pure plug-in with the Universal Adapter, our team believes we will be able to innovate and integrate faster than what was previously possible.
For those looking to get up and running with Pure & Veeam, the plug-in and joint solution whitepaper are published and available online.
Veeam and Pure Storage are actively working on future integration capabilities. Both companies have an aggressive roadmap to enhance what’s possible in future releases.
With that, a few items of note on version 1.0 of the plugin:
- Support for the Pure Storage plug-in requires Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5v3 and Purity 4.8 (which includes the REST API 1.7 library)
- Only VMFS datastores are supported with vSphere. Veeam Backup & Restore currently doesn’t support VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols).
- The Veeam Universal Adapter currently only supports VMware vSphere. Veeam supports Hyper-V off-host backups via hardware VSS providers. Veeam currently does not support storage-array integration with OpenStack.
- The Veeam Universal Adapter APIs currently lack support for managing array replication. Pure replication support is planned for a future release.
- The Pure plug-in currently does not display snapshots in Purity Protection Groups (pgroups). This limitation restricts Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots to only those created by Veeam Backup & Recovery. Expanding this capability is being considered for a future release.
- FlashBlade is currently only supported as a Veeam Ready Repository and not as a backup source.
Wrapping Up:
I very excited about version 1.0 of the Veeam and Pure Storage integrations. I’d like to extend my thanks to the Product Management, Engineering, Solution Architect and Alliance teams of both companies – simply outstanding work!
Here’s hoping you’ll catch up with Pure and Veeam at one of our upcoming user conferences. Pure Storage is a Platinum sponsor of VeeamOn occurring in May, in Chicago. Veeam is a Zettabyte sponsor of Pure Accelerate, also in May, in San Francisco.