Veeam eases SAN snapshot restoration

In the lead-up to EMC VMware’s closely followed VMworld conference, many infrastructure vendors are taking advantage of the spotlight to roll out their latest goods. One such announcement from Veeam caught my eye: It will show a new capability called Veeam Explorer for Snapshots that will be released with Veeam Backup and Replication 6.5, due by 2013.

Veeam Explorer for Snapshots extends the same image, file, and application-level restoration capabilities present in Veeam Backup and Replication to SAN-based snapshots. Effectively, this feature will let you use the same tools and interface you might already use to restore from virtual machine backups and replicas to also restore data from SAN-side snapshots. However, in its first appearance, this feature will be compatible with only Hewlett-Packard’s LeftHand P4000 line of physical and virtual iSCSI SANs, though Veeam hopes to sign on more storage vendors as time goes on.

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There are a couple of interesting aspects to this announcement. First off, the capabilities Veeam Explorer for Snapshots will offer are undeniably cool and will probably motivate more storage admins to make use of SAN-side snapshot tech. Although the feature doesn’t exactly do anything you can’t already manage manually on your own, it aims to make very easy what many find to be a complicated and time-consuming task — a real asset when you’re scrambling to pull off a critical restore. However, the announcement of HP as an initial SAN-side partner may also say something about the relentless consolidation that has swept over the storage market over the past few years.

Reducing the effort of SAN snapshots

When they are implemented well by a virtualized storage array, demand-allocated SAN-side snapshots can provide enormously useful restore capabilities. In most modern SAN implementations, SAN snapshots can be taken at will or on a scheduled basis, and they typically have a very minimal impact on storage performance — unlike the snapshots of yesteryear, which often had enormous write performance penalties associated with them. These snapshots certainly have an associated capacity cost (usually related loosely to amount of write traffic the volume is experiencing), but this cost is offset by the incredibly valuable capability to almost instantaneously roll a volume back in time to when a snapshot was created.

SAN snapshots can be useful in a wide variety of situations. For example, imagine a database-driven application has experienced some form of data corruption that has rendered its database unusable. Without SAN snapshots, your best bet might be to restore a backup of the database, then hope the transaction logs will replay properly and you won’t lose very much data. However, simply restoring that data might take hours, especially if it’s a large database.

If your luck is really bad, you could find the restored database is still corrupt, then have to restore from an even older backup — wasting still more time. Worst of all, in most cases, you’ll be forced to disrupt your now-defunct production environment to make space for the restores — potentially destroying any chance you may have to recover additional data.

If you have a comprehensive SAN snapshot schedule set up, you could instantly roll the database back to right before it encountered the corruption with a few mouse clicks and repeat that process as many times as you need to — all without actually modifying the “known bad” state you’ve found yourself in. This gives you the ultimate in recovery time versus data corruption, as well as letting you perform whatever degree of forensics you desire on the corrupt dataset.

Although SAN snapshots are pretty awesome, they become substantially more difficult to use in virtualized environments. This is mostly due to the fact that the SAN creates these snapshots on a per-volume level. In the database example, that might be a couple of different volumes (say, a log and data volume). However, in a virtualized environment, one very large volume could hold the disks for 20 or 30 servers — so it’s impossible to simply roll back the disk state for a single VM from the SAN.

Of course, restoring an entire VM from a snapshot could be done. In the VMware world, you’d present the point-in-time snapshot you want back to the vSphere host, mount it, find the target VM’s files in the snapshot, add that VM into inventory, migrate it back onto its original volume, and fire it up. If you’ve licensed the Storage vMotion feature, you can even start the VM from the snapshot copy, then live-migrate the VM back onto the volume where it’s supposed to live, providing for a speedy time-to-restore. If you’re after a single file, you might end up with a roughly similar plan, except you’d track down the virtual disk file that has the data you want, mount it on the original VM, then pull the data out.

Veeam’s Explorer for Snapshots feature promises to do all that work for you in far less time than you could do it manually — all while using the same wizard-driven interface you may already be used to. In addition, you could use the same application and file-level restore capabilities for normal Veeam backups, including restoring individual files and individual Microsoft Exchange mail items. Given that it’s included in all versions of Veeam Backup and Replication 6.5, there’s no extra cost.

Filling a hole in HP’s portfolio

It’s interesting that HP chose to work with Veeam to develop this feature. (HP is promoting it heavily with the rebrand of HP’s P4000 VSA into the StoreVirtual VSA.) Perhaps HP wants to take advantage of Veeam’s high growth and reach its more than 43,000 customers, all of whom HP would love to sell server and storage gear to.

However, it may also be driven by a gap in HP’s capability set: HP is one of the few major storage providers without a strong backup software offering for virtualization. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen HP Data Protector deployed in the field, usually only in legacy HP-UX shops.

If that’s true, I wonder if Veeam will be able to attract other storage vendors. The great wave of consolidation has seen most of the popular storage startups gobbled up by the larger providers, so there are only a few major storage vendors that don’t already have a horse in the backup software race. EMC markets Networker and Avamar; at the same time, Dell has had strong ties to both Commvault and Symantec, owns Appassure, and recently purchased Quest Software — the maker of vRanger, Veeam’s primary competitor in the virtualization backup space.

This article, “Veeam eases SAN snapshot restoration,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Matt Prigge’s Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in storage at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.