Veeam v11 is here - listen to the podcast!

[CalvinZito]

I'd like to share a very comprehensive podcast I did with industry colleague Michael Cade from Veeam Software. In the podcast we take a deep dive into the just announced Veeam version 11 release.

In case you didn't already know, we were the first company that Veeam did snapshot integration with back in 2012 so the relationship has been there a long time and remains very strong. Michael and I don't spend much time in this podcast talking about that integration but if you want to learn about that, check out this podcast I did with Rick Vanover from Veeam Software when v10 was released. 

But let's move on to the latest with Veeam v11

NOTE: I'm updating this blog post with links to my new podcast that is now an official HPE podcast.  

Here are the places you can now subscribe to Around the IT Block presented by HPE! You can subscribe to it on Google Podcast, Amazon Music, Stitcher, Podcast Adddict and Spotify podcast. Hopefully it will be on iTunes soon.

So you can navigate through the podcast, here's what Michael and I talked about:

• 0:00 - 1:55 Introductions
• 1:55 - 3:40 What was the focus of v11?
• 3:40 - 17:30 Diving deep into CDP, Ransomware, and Instant recovery
• 17:30 - 20:10 Managing data with more intelligence
• 20:10 - 23:40 Controlling backup/retention costs
• 23:40 - 29:10 Improvements to Apollo 4500 backup performance in v11
• 29:10 - 30:00 Wrap-up

HPE Apollo as an all-in-one Veeam Backup Appliance

One of the discussions Michael and I had (towards the end of the "other features" section of the podcast) was using the HPE Apollo 4500 as an all-in-one backup appliance. This means you're using it to run your Veeam Backup software and as the target for your backup. In a weekly Veeam Forums email, Anton Gostev Sr VP of product management at Veeam was gushing about the work that had been done by HPE and specifically my colleague Federico Venier.  When I want to get details about HPE Storage and Veeam, I go to him. I want to share part of the email that Anton shared about the work Federico has done:

One area where v11 really changes the game is all-in-one backup appliances: deployments where all Veeam components are installed on a single server with lots of disks. Those who follow this digest closely know I've been promoting the usage of general-purpose servers for Veeam deployment for many years now, and every release we kept enhancing the engine for this deployment scenario. But if it was more of an evolution before, v11 is the revolution because it more than doubles the backup performance per appliance.

To get there, we had to make many changes even to the most basic stuff – for example, how we write backup files content to storage! We also had to revisit our shared memory transport engine that passes data between source and target data movers running on the same box – incredibly, at these performance levels, even modern RAM speed can become a bottleneck if you don't work with it optimally.

Finally, once this was all behind us, we ran into compute becoming the primary bottleneck on multi-CPU servers! So we had to implement full NUMA awareness and enhance our data movers placement logic to ensure they never end up on different CPUs.

I know Federico is working on a technical blog post that will detail more on HPE and Veeam but wanted to share this because it is very impressive that they were able to achieve 11.4 GB/s backup speed as a result of the changes that were made. That is awesome. 

Get more on v11

As you would imagine, Veeam has several blog posts already talking about v11. I wanted to point to them.

• Veeam Backup & Replication v11: Accelerate Your Journey via Danny Allan, SVP and CTO
• V11: Delivering low RPOs for Tier One applications with Veeam CDP via Anothony Spiteri, Senior Technologist
• V11: Immutable primary backup storage with a hardware-agnostic touch via my podcast guest Michael Cade, Senior Technologist

There are more but check Veeam's blog to see them. 

About Calvin Zito (formerly HPEStorageGuy, formerly The Storage Godfather - but still Calvin)

I'm Calvin Zito and November 2020 marks 37 years with HP/HPE. I've worked in HPE Storage since 1990. I was recently recognized as a 10 time VMware vExpert. As an early adopter of social media and active participant in communities, I've blogged for over 13 years. I'm also an avid Boise State fan - and excited that they've just decided to play this fall! You can find me on Twitter as @CalvinZito. If you don't follow me on Twitter, please do it now! You can also contact me via email. 

Calvin Zito
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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