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Over the past few months, I have been studying and testing different options for secure and immutable backup storage with Veeam Backup & Replication. I tried to compare the features of the available options:

  • Veeam Hardened Repository
  • Object Storage Repositories
  • Deduplicating Storage Appliances

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. The best choice always depends on specific requirements and the environment. Some products even cross traditional category boundaries, making direct comparisons even more important.

I would love to hear your opinions on the advantages and disadvantages, your real-world experiences, and any corrections or additional insights you might have. In the article, I also summarized the key parameters of selected products.

Any feedback is very much appreciated!

Choosing a secure backup storage solution for Veeam

Great article, very detailed and laid out well.


My opinion on that:

I often go with VHR for an on-prem Tier 1 for fast recovery (lowest RTO) due to data locality and local performance (10G / 25G / 40G).

As second tier and for long-term (and often GFS) backups I go with Wasabi or any other cloud tier to avoid having to care about hardware with immutability which often makes migration scenarios (in case of hardware refreshes or hardware failures) impossible.

 

I personally don’t like dedup appliances that much since they often have a low restore performance - but honestly I haven’t tried out state-of-the-art appliances for around 2 years so might have to refresh my opinion on that.

 

Best

Lukas


Thank you very much for the information and experience.

VHR seems to me to be a good choice in terms of performance and price. What bothers me about object storage is that I don't know exactly what is stored 😀.


A great and detailed article Petr.  It is an interesting question as we were looking at VHR but since we are a larger enterprise are probably going to use Object Storage with Immutability instead.

I see needs for all these but the Dedupe Appliance should only be for LTR and not a primary backup repository as restores suffer with this.


Thanks a lot Chris. I also see a difference in Enterprise storage (I still like to use the term disk array) and a standard server from a high availability perspective. I'm trying to find out from people what the optimal solution is 😁.


Very detailed write up. After researching all I have a mix myself of VHR’s and Cloud object I am testing. I also have airgapped tape backups which help me sleep at night. The nice thing about S3 storage that is not self managed is how easy it is to implement. 

Do to my size I had to use SAN with physical repos for VHR’s on them. they are extremely fast and performant however.  I always recommend calculating the space required for total repository (Full, incremental, and some room for a buffer) without going over 80% on the storage.  When you have the total size, use that to calculate your backup/restore times and networking or fiber requirements.  There is no point buying a flash array and connecting a single proxy with 10Gbps networking to it. 

You can also estimate the amount of cpu, memory, and servers you will need in total based of this number. When you end up with a SAN for your VHR, you might as well get the speeds you want or you are leaving money on the table. 

 

 


Thank you very much Scott for your practical tips 👍.


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