In the last few weeks, we’ve had the opportunity to co-present with our partner Veeam at Quantum’s VirtualQ I Protect & Archive event, and also engage with Veeam customers at the recent VeeamON 2020 show. And even with so much focus on enabling remote work, enabling hybrid- and multi-cloud infrastructures, and all the new features in Veeam V10, we continue to see interest and engagement when it comes to these topics:
1. Ransomware protection and 3-2-1-1 data protection practice
A long-time best practice more relevant today than ever, the 3-2-1-1 rule specifies three copies of your data, stored on two different types of media, where one copy is offsite, and one is offline, air-gapped, or immutable. There are a couple of new twists to this rule that we’ve been emphasizing:
- The first is that the ‘offsite’ copy is increasingly in the cloud. Cloud services from AWS, Azure, and others are growing like crazy, and Veeam and other backup applications can now easily make an offsite copy to the cloud. This can replace recovering tapes from a vault in many cases, which can take a long time and is difficult. However, in this paradigm, tape still plays a role – as an on-premise “offline” copy of your data. Veeam and Quantum continue to advocate keeping a copy on tape, and with the Active Vault feature that Quantum introduced earlier this year as part of our Ransomware Protection Packages , administrators can store backup copies in a totally secure, offline environment without ever handling tapes.
- The second nuance is this notion of an ‘immutable’ copy of data. LTO tape has had Write Once Read Many (“WORM”) functionality for many years, and combined with its inherent offline nature, AES-256-bit encryption, and it’s low cost and low power, tape is an ideal immutable data vault. But our customers are also looking to use object storage for long-term storage for compliance, and that’s why we are in the process of certifying our ActiveScale object storage system to be Veeam Ready. We expect to make that announcement in July.
2. It’s all about availability of your production systems and applications
Even with all the new features and many different backup and protection technologies being employed, at the end-of-the-day, it is about maximizing the availability of your production environment. Even protecting applications that run in the cloud. And with Veeam V10 and Quantum DXi (a Veeam Integrated backup repository), we continue to improve performance so our customers can maximize availability with faster backups and restores. One new feature in Veeam V10 is called Fast Clone, or Block Clone, and the latest version of Quantum DXi software can leverage this feature to dramatically speed up synthetic full backup performance. Creating a synthetic full backup that use to take hours now can be completed in minutes, and we’ve reduced the strain on the network and Veeam backup infrastructure dramatically. This latest enhancement builds on the Veeam Data Mover Service (VDMS) integration that DXi has had for several years and makes DXi the clear best choice for a Veeam backup repository.
Achieving 3-2-1-1 Data Protection
And now that Quantum can bring together Veeam Integrated backup repositories with DXi, a soon-to-be-Veeam-Ready object store in ActiveScale, and industry-leading tape storage with unique Active Vault software, we are in a truly unique position to deliver infrastructures to Veeam customers, so they can achieve 3-2-1-1 data protection.
See these related resources for more information about Quantum & Veeam solutions: