StarWind VTL: Seamless Amazon S3 Cloud Storage Integration for Veeam-centric Infrastructures

INTRODUCTION

Today, all major cloud storage providers and long-term data vaulting services utilize physical tape libraries to provide enormous amounts of cost-effective “cold” storage for their customers. Such services also present different “flavors” of VTL solutions to simplify the storage and backup management for end users. Virtual Tape Library as a technology has already proved itself as a reliable solution which helps to enhance the 3-2-1 backup rule with several significant benefits.

PROBLEM

Leading cloud storage providers offer cost-efficient object storage to accumulate the “cold” data:
Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier, Azure Blob Storage, Google Nearline and Google Coldline.

Many backup vendors offer different solutions to manage backups and configure cloud synchronization. However, it is often a complex and challenging task for the IT staff to properly select and deploy the required software or hardware, and configure separate components to operate in conjunction with each other.

Also, most backup solutions do not offer a “smart” data de-staging where backups are first offloaded to faster and more expensive storage tier and then are de-staged to slower and more cost efficient one.

SOLUTION

StarWind VTL is well-recognized among IT professionals as a unique solution which can seamlessly integrate into any backup environment. StarWind VTL helps to significantly enhance the backup process increasing the tape backup speed while adding additional ransomware protection since it can not access the virtual tape device.

What is more, with the development of cloud storage technologies and price reduction of “cold” storage, we decided to improve our VTL solution, adding functionality that will help our users to fully integrate the cost efficient “cloud tier” into their backup infrastructure and avoid being puzzled searching for third-party software.

StarWind Cloud VTL conjoins with all major cloud storage providers, ultimately adding the “cold” tier to the backup infrastructure ensuring compliance with the “3-2-1” backup rule. StarWind VTL to Cloud supports both performance and capacity optimized object storage like Amazon S3 and Glacier delivering significant benefits:

• It allows implementing Disk-to-Disk-to-Cloud (D2D2C) backup strategy. Essentially, this is a variation of D2D2T approach that gives higher flexibility and cost-efficiency by replacing local tape drives with inexpensive “tape in cloud” storage. The expensive physical tape library infrastructures and corresponding service costs are no longer an issue.
• StarWind Cloud VTL is a Veeam Ready solution. Each software component has repeatedly been tested and checked for compatibility. It just works!
• Ability to “tier” backups between cloud storage with different performance and efficiency features for maintaining low cost per GB without compromising RTO.

СONCLUSION

Object cloud storage was designed for infrequently accessed data like backups and archives. Thus, backups performed via StarWind VTL become perfect candidates for offloading to the cloud. StarWind Cloud VTL grants effortless integration into existing backup infrastructure being a “fire and forget” solution. Once the VTL device settings and retention policies are configured, the backups will be stored and automatically de-staged to cloud storage, saving the time of the IT staff.

StarWind VTL creates an additional backup copy, allows meeting the regulatory requirements for having tape backups and significantly decreases backup costs. It also keeps the performance of the system stable increasing the speed of the backup process, avoiding the overlapping of backup jobs with the production environment. Additionally, StarWind Virtual Tape Library supports cloud deployment scenario, changing the expensive local storage to cost-efficient cloud vault. In comparison to local spindle-based storage, keeping data on inexpensive cloud storage like Amazon S3 and Glacier requires considerably smaller investment.