When it comes to business continuity and disaster recovery, there are a plethora of options out there. From built-in vendor tools, third party tools and your typical backup/recovery strategy. Choosing a solution does not always result in the best solution, if we take into account the fact that no one person knows all the tools available, and no one has time to research them all. A lot of times tools are chosen based on the vendor’s size, reputation and word of mouth; and of course, a lot of marketing, which I am not a fan of. Every vendor will always say that their solution is the best out there, so don’t rely on marketing material, instead talk to colleagues and other IT individuals through social media, conferences, etc.

Recently I was tasked with providing a BC solution for a specific application. The business was overwhelmed when I presented six different approaches since they really didn’t know what they wanted. After some meetings, I was able to extract what they wanted to achieve, which was a cheap/free solution utilizing current infrastructure that provides granular, and fast recovery of VMs and file level. This sounded like a challenge, but luckily I had just attended a Veeam session at Cisco Live 2015.

The solution selected was Veeam Backup and Replication. This tool allowed for full visibility of existing NetApp volume snapshots of the VMware environment without having to run new backups/snapshots or any additional jobs. Veeam B&R, includes an Explorer tool that connects to both the VMware vCenter and the NetApp arrays. It is then capable of looking inside each volume snapshot, and present the actual VM instead of all individual files. At this point, you have the option to restore the entire VM or even individual files within that object. The great part about this is that if you have a snapshot for exchange server, you are actually able to restore files within that Exchange snap.

Veeam also supports other storage vendors such as HP Lefthand and 3PAR, and new storage vendors will soon be added to this product.

Give it a try, at some point this may be the right solution to a problem or business requirement.