White Papers

Introduction
5 Dell EMC SC Series: Veeam Backup & Replication Integration | 4061-SC-SG
1 Introduction
Virtualization has been and continues to be a transformative technology in the modern data center.
Conventional methods of server consolidation used in the past are no longer practical in a virtualize-first era.
The benefits of efficiency, mobility, uptime, and cost savings are quickly realized. In the wake of these efforts,
new opportunities for data protection and recovery have emerged. In some cases, these solutions have risen
out of necessity to keep pace with virtualized data-center trends. In other cases, they are needed to maintain
increasingly aggressive service-level agreements tied to data protection and recovery.
Veeam Backup & Replication offers several methods for protecting and recovering virtual machine (VM) and
application-specific data in VMware
®
vSphere
®
environments. vSphere snapshots are leveraged to allow
continuous operation of the VM. At the same time, the Veeam Backup & Replication proxy server streams the
quiesced contents of the VM from its vSphere host to a Veeam native backup file. This file resides on storage
that is accessible to the backup server. The length of time a VM is in vSphere snapshot mode depends on the
amount of time it takes to back it up. When the backup is complete, the vSphere snapshot is closed. For small
backup jobs, a VM may be in snapshot mode for a few minutes. For much larger jobs such as a full backup of
a large data set, a VM may be in snapshot mode for several hours.
Veeam and Dell EMC have partnered to offer SC Series native snapshot support with Backup & Replication
software, providing a scalable and performance-optimized solution with robust features. This offloads the bulk
of the snapshot exposure and proxy server backup streaming from the vSphere host to the SC Series array
during the backup process. Likewise, shortening the data-protection process by using SC Series snapshots
allows for more snapshot frequency and a better Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Lastly, data recovery such
as Veeam Instant VM Recovery
®
alternatively stems directly from SC Series view volumes instead of from
backup files on Veeam vPower
®
NFS.
Virtual machine open snapshot lifetime comparison
This document provides a brief introduction to Veeam Backup & Replication with storage integration. For
more detailed information, refer to the Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4 User Guide for VMware
vSphere. Veeam supports Microsoft
®
Hyper-V
®
but this paper focuses on VMware vSphere virtualization.