We do have some appliances that we deploy depending on the scenario or what is sold or if the data transfer is too large to send over the wire we use a device for backups then transfer to our datacenters. But that is typically the only cases when we do.
Hi @dloseke : in my opinion : if the customer has on-premise infrastructure, always create backups on-premise! It’s the fastest way - limited time that the snapshots are open and restores are running fast. Then create a copy to an offsite location as the 3-2-1-10-0 describes and as a service provider of course to the Veeam Cloud Connect infrastructure having an offsite copy and if using insider protection (or if the service providers uses also capacity tier with immutable object storage) you hava an offline copy.
Not at an MSP anymore but we used to offer Datto BaaS services and found the sizing options very restrictive, this was 2019/2020 though so it’s something they might have improved by now.
We would design a complete BaaS solution with managed services covering an on-premises VBR installation and hardware (customer funded, sometimes finance backed) and then deliver the rental of the Veeam licensing and Veeam Cloud Connect Backup and/or replication storage.
But we’d never deploy hardware to a customer site that we were liable financially for, the increase in risk isn’t appealing!
Answering specifically the last question around hardware, we used to get great deals on Dell NX series servers, or we’d do similar spec as the PowerEdge versions with BOSS cards. And then these would be all-in-one servers, not domain joined, managed by our RMM solution and VSPC.
Hi there!
I always like to have, at least one on-prem backup copy, just in case there is no Internet line, or the speed isn’t right, or whatever.
for small installations, we usually recommended a NAS (Sinology for example) as a cost / effective solution, with SATA Disks and sometimes SSD cache disks.
We also used the Synology NAS for replicas destination as well, so it was worth it, reliable and not costly (20TB with SSD cache for less than 3.5K€)
Also was a good way for customers to see their backups, so something physical was there, not only remote or cloud.
For medium / large sites, we deployed Deduplication appliances, like HPE StoreOnce, mid size virtualised, big sites physical appliance.
cheers.
Hey all, my company is using Veeam mostly for our medium-sized clients, but some of our smaller clients with only a few VM’s generally are using something else. A couple with old Datto Siris or Alto appliances, quite a few with Barracuda backup appliances, and even an Intronis client. Most of these clients are paying for more of a BaaS service on a monthly or yearly agreement, though I think a couple actually own their the Barracuda appliance that we sold them in the past.
With that said, we’re pretty invested with Datto despite the Kaseya attachment, and they caught the ear of my boss about leasing out Datto Siris 4 appliances to replace all of those non-Veeam clients. That said, I’d rather move them over the the Service Provider side of things and get everything moved into the Veeam house.
Here’s what I was thinking. We historically don’t like hosting customer data, and so somewhat in parallel with my developing a VB365 solution for our clients (as most are using Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud backup and a couple on Datto Backupify) where we would host the server and supply the licensing on our infrastructure but use the likes of Wasabi Object for storage. I was thinking about using our Service Provider Console to manage the backups obviously and using Wasabi and/or 11:11 Systems for the storage. With Datto, they put an appliance on-site which will hold a minimum of 30 days of restore points and keep a copy of everything in the Datto cloud (AWS I believe). The Siris 4 appliances are apparently Supermicro servers and the Siris 5 are Dell Optiplex/Precision Rack/PowerEdge devices depending on sizing.
Keeping in mind that that we’re talking about clients with less than 10 VM’s (I think the most on this list was 6 VM’s, and one client is a single physical server), what are you doing in these sorts of situations? Are you keeping any sort of device on-premise for a local copy, or are you just pushing them across to the wire to your own infrastructure or a cloud repository? Thoughts? Ideas?
Thanks!
SANs or NAS devices for local storage, and backup copyjobs or replication jobs to move data offsite to cloud storage. The more points of redundancy you have, the better.
Datto is a shell of what it once was. Their devices are cheap and unreliable and their backup product has major verification issues that cause you constant problems with screenshot verifications and forcing chkdsks on the protected devices. Datto is just a mess right now and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. The backup agent is extremely unreliable. Support now takes about 30 minutes to get ahold of either by chat or phone. They are no longer the powerhouse they used to be. They made the mistake many fast growing companies make and they started to try and build a little empire and buy up every business they could get their hands on, meanwhile ignoring their main product and not vetting their development staff for quality, thereby leading to a dramatic drop in product quality. Now complaints are coming up that you can’t even get ahold of your sales reps if you have issues. It’s just a mess.
Hi there!
I always like to have, at least one on-prem backup copy, just in case there is no Internet line, or the speed isn’t right, or whatever.
for small installations, we usually recommended a NAS (Sinology for example) as a cost / effective solution, with SATA Disks and sometimes SSD cache disks.
We also used the Synology NAS for replicas destination as well, so it was worth it, reliable and not costly (20TB with SSD cache for less than 3.5K€)
Also was a good way for customers to see their backups, so something physical was there, not only remote or cloud.
For medium / large sites, we deployed Deduplication appliances, like HPE StoreOnce, mid size virtualised, big sites physical appliance.
cheers.
We’ve been doing Synology’s for both primary and copy repo’s in the past, but it’s been my goal to not use them any longer, especially when coupled with REFS filesystems for fear of corruption and errors, largely based off of evidence that Anton Gostev has posted in the past and the fact that REFS hasn’t had a stellar record for me as of late when coupled with Windows updates on VM’s. With that said…they still have a place with the right use case, and I still have a several clients using QNAP and Synology NAS’s, but going forward I’ve been using purpose-built servers.
Not at an MSP anymore but we used to offer Datto BaaS services and found the sizing options very restrictive, this was 2019/2020 though so it’s something they might have improved by now.
We would design a complete BaaS solution with managed services covering an on-premises VBR installation and hardware (customer funded, sometimes finance backed) and then deliver the rental of the Veeam licensing and Veeam Cloud Connect Backup and/or replication storage.
But we’d never deploy hardware to a customer site that we were liable financially for, the increase in risk isn’t appealing!
Answering specifically the last question around hardware, we used to get great deals on Dell NX series servers, or we’d do similar spec as the PowerEdge versions with BOSS cards. And then these would be all-in-one servers, not domain joined, managed by our RMM solution and VSPC.
I was pleased to hear that Datto is no longer using ShadowProtect SPX for the engine running backups as I’ve had repeated issues with that.
I don’t think we have too much of an issue renting/leasing out hardware to a client on-premise, but in the past, we’ve generally had the client purchasing hardware such as this, but to offer a true BaaS offering, I think the hardware would need to be on a rental agreement as well.
The servers we are putting out now tend to be R440, R540, or T640’s though we have used smaller servers such as T340’s as well. And yes, we usually use the BOSS card for the OS and then can use all disk ports for the repository. Datta got my wheels turning on smaller devices though -- they’re using, on the extremely small scale, Optiplex workstations or Precision rack workstations, but I’m still trying to figure out what would be best for those extremely small clients. I just wasn’t sure if anyone out there was really doing just the agent on each OS and backing up across the wire at any sort of scale. I’m much more comfortable with an appliance on-site as well, but there’s some hardware purchasing involved as well.
Datto is a shell of what it once was. Their devices are cheap and unreliable and their backup product has major verification issues that cause you constant problems with screenshot verifications and forcing chkdsks on the protected devices. Datto is just a mess right now and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. The backup agent is extremely unreliable. Support now takes about 30 minutes to get ahold of either by chat or phone. They are no longer the powerhouse they used to be. They made the mistake many fast growing companies make and they started to try and build a little empire and buy up every business they could get their hands on, meanwhile ignoring their main product and not vetting their development staff for quality, thereby leading to a dramatic drop in product quality. Now complaints are coming up that you can’t even get ahold of your sales reps if you have issues. It’s just a mess.
Thanks for this feedback. I can’t say I’m surprised to hear it...especially with Kaseya having their talons into the company. I was hoping the screenshot verifications would be better than it was when using ShadowProtect for the engine…that was a mess to tweak to get good results for the couple of devices we have out there now.
We manage a lot of BaaS, all client have their onprem repository because is more efficient in my opinion.
Keep also in mind to do the correct sizing for the bandwidth, client side and more important provider side (could be a bottleneck), depending how much data to transfer and the desired RPO.
Hello @dloseke , just discovered Alto appliances from the following blog post. Disk Archive Corporation offers an alternative to LTO – Blocks and Files
Do you have any feedback to share on this subject with Veeam? It could a great alternative for user some cases specially when you need a real “Air Gap”.
We offer a mixture some smaller clients don’t want the added expense so backup directly to our cloud connect, Generally, these are on one of our UDC circuits though.
Otherwise its generally a PowerEdge all-in-one we tend to deploy.
Hey all, my company is using Veeam mostly for our medium-sized clients, but some of our smaller clients with only a few VM’s generally are using something else. A couple with old Datto Siris or Alto appliances, quite a few with Barracuda backup appliances, and even an Intronis client. Most of these clients are paying for more of a BaaS service on a monthly or yearly agreement, though I think a couple actually own their the Barracuda appliance that we sold them in the past.
With that said, we’re pretty invested with Datto despite the Kaseya attachment, and they caught the ear of my boss about leasing out Datto Siris 4 appliances to replace all of those non-Veeam clients. That said, I’d rather move them over the the Service Provider side of things and get everything moved into the Veeam house.
Here’s what I was thinking. We historically don’t like hosting customer data, and so somewhat in parallel with my developing a VB365 solution for our clients (as most are using Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud backup and a couple on Datto Backupify) where we would host the server and supply the licensing on our infrastructure but use the likes of Wasabi Object for storage. I was thinking about using our Service Provider Console to manage the backups obviously and using Wasabi and/or 11:11 Systems for the storage. With Datto, they put an appliance on-site which will hold a minimum of 30 days of restore points and keep a copy of everything in the Datto cloud (AWS I believe). The Siris 4 appliances are apparently Supermicro servers and the Siris 5 are Dell Optiplex/Precision Rack/PowerEdge devices depending on sizing.
Keeping in mind that that we’re talking about clients with less than 10 VM’s (I think the most on this list was 6 VM’s, and one client is a single physical server), what are you doing in these sorts of situations? Are you keeping any sort of device on-premise for a local copy, or are you just pushing them across to the wire to your own infrastructure or a cloud repository? Thoughts? Ideas?
Thanks!
Hi @dloseke ! How are you?
Some critical aspects will determine the allocation of an on-prem repository. For example, a minimal on-premises repository is required to store SQL transaction logs. It is not possible to upload directly to the cloud repository.
If the tenant/customer needs Instant VM Recovery, Secure Restore, and Surebackup, it is necessary to deploy a local repo. At this moment, Cloud NAS Backup is not supported by Cloud Connect.
Due to these aspects, in general, when the customer has VMs in the environment, I recommend partners to implement on-prem resources.
Sincerely,
We offer a mixture some smaller clients don’t want the added expense so backup directly to our cloud connect, Generally, these are on one of our UDC circuits though.
Otherwise its generally a PowerEdge all-in-one we tend to deploy.
This is what we do. First stop is a PowerEdge purpose-built with Veeam, but if the client doesn’t want a Cap-Ex, then we are deploying Veeam Agents or VBR on their environment. If they have a NAS on site, great, otherwise direct to cloud via Wasabi. Either way, a copy will go to Wasabi.
Hello @dloseke , just discovered Alto appliances from the following blog post. Disk Archive Corporation offers an alternative to LTO – Blocks and Files
Do you have any feedback to share on this subject with Veeam? It could a great alternative for user some cases specially when you need a real “Air Gap”.
I just skimmed the article posted. This ALTO (Alternative LTO) is different than the Datto Alto (and Siris) devices I’m familiar with. Datto Alto and Siris are more of a turn-key appliance for backups that used to run ShadowProtect on a Linux OS but now have moved to their own backup solution. This ALTO noted is more of an archiving solution. Love it when two vendors use the same product name, but to be fair, I don’t think either of the ALTO’s are big names in the industry. Interestingly, the look of the ALTO reminds me of the Storinator 45 and some of the SuperMicro storage hardware. Not sure if they’re related hardware...just interesting.
Hi @dloseke ! How are you?
Some critical aspects will determine the allocation of an on-prem repository. For example, a minimal on-premises repository is required to store SQL transaction logs. It is not possible to upload directly to the cloud repository.
If the tenant/customer needs Instant VM Recovery, Secure Restore, and Surebackup, it is necessary to deploy a local repo. At this moment, Cloud NAS Backup is not supported by Cloud Connect.
Due to these aspects, in general, when the customer has VMs in the environment, I recommend partners to implement on-prem resources.
Sincerely,
Hi Luiz. We don’t have a lot of folks running any significant SQL workloads, but you raise a very good point. I will say that most of our clients are running an on-premise VBR machine, either as a physical box with local storage or as a VM with a NAS attached for the repo, and then copy jobs to either VCC (Iland/11:11) or S3-Compatible (Wasabi). It’s only those that don’t have hardware or don’t want hardware that we’re going direct to cloud. We don’t have a lot of machines doing this...less than 10 I’d say, but that’s significant growth over the zero that we had deployed 8-12 months ago. We had one client that probably would have gone direct to cloud except they wanted to replicate VM’s to a cloud where they could be spun up DRaaS, so we ended up deploying a VM to run VBR to facilitate the VM replication. And I agree, on-prem resources is the best bet. The main clients we have going direct to cloud are those that refused to buy hardware on-premise, even something as simple as a small 2-bay NAS which we recommended. Direct-to-Cloud is not something we lead with, and honestly is really more of a last resort.
Hello @dloseke , just discovered Alto appliances from the following blog post. Disk Archive Corporation offers an alternative to LTO – Blocks and Files
Do you have any feedback to share on this subject with Veeam? It could a great alternative for user some cases specially when you need a real “Air Gap”.
I just skimmed the article posted. This ALTO (Alternative LTO) is different than the Datto Alto (and Siris) devices I’m familiar with. Datto Alto and Siris are more of a turn-key appliance for backups that used to run ShadowProtect on a Linux OS but now have moved to their own backup solution. This ALTO noted is more of an archiving solution. Love it when two vendors use the same product name, but to be fair, I don’t think either of the ALTO’s are big names in the industry. Interestingly, the look of the ALTO reminds me of the Storinator 45 and some of the SuperMicro storage hardware. Not sure if they’re related hardware...just interesting.
Hey @dloseke , sorry for the misunderstanding and thank you for the explanation 
. Probably they're using a manufacturer identical to other solutions, so I wouldn't be surprised if it looks like other things.
