Erasure Coding: the best data protection for scaling-out?

I’ve always been a fan of scale-out storage solutions, and I’ve always preached about them.
As data is skyrocketing, the best viable way to cope with this growth is having a system that can be scaled accordingly without the pain of data migrations involving TBs of data. One of the limits of scale-out systems however has always been the data protection techniques applied to them. RAID is inefficient, replication is too expensive, so what about Erasure Coding? Is it mature enough to become the new data protection technique for storage systems?

Veeam Extract Utility, quick restores without the Veeam server

One of the biggest misconceptions about Veeam Backup & Replication, often fueled by competitors, is that it requires the complete server installation in order to run restores. So, this becomes a Single Point of Failure, just like many other solutions from competitors. This is completely untrue: there are two main features in Veeam that make restores possible even without the server installation.

Can you clone a VM replicated by Veeam?

Veeam Backup & Replication has always had since its first version the possibility to replicate VMs, together with the backup capabilities. Once a VM is replicated in a secondary site, it could become a great resource for additional activities: from automated recovery tests (called SureReplica in Veeam) to become also the source for cloning activities. Data are already locally saved, there is no need to retrieve anything else from the source site, so any operation is quick an easy. Are there any informations we should be aware of in doing these operations? Let’s find it out.

Veeam Backup & Replication 7.0 Patch 4: VSAN support!

Veeam just released the new and latest patch for Backup & Replication 7.0, numbered Patch 4. The new patch can be installed on any previous version of 7.0 release, since as usual the patch is cumulative. The final build number after the upgrade will be now 7.0.0.871.
There are as usual many improvements and fixes, and two big enhancements. The first one is the added support for Microsoft SQL 2014, but for sure the biggest news is with no doubt the support for VMware Virtual SAN, unofficially shorten VSAN by many.

The hidden story of the Veeam and Nutanix white paper

Last week, Veeam and Nutanix have published a joint technical paper, regarding the best practices to use Veeam Backup & Replication v7 in a Nutanix infrastructure, when running VMware vSphere. The paper is 20 pages long, it has been written by myself and Derek Seaman, and you can download it here. This post however is about what’s “not” written in that paper, its story, and what I learned from this great experience.