Modern data centers are becoming more and more complex, and there are several reasons for this trend. First, there is a business reason behind any technical enhancement, and lately the paramount business requirement is to shrink as much as possible (the so called “time to market”). People have become used to the quick deploy time provided by virtualization – reducing provision times from weeks and months to days or hours. This has led to the more general concept that any new workload should be immediately available upon request. Cloud-like technologies have further pushed this concept by adding additional elements to the data center such as “infinite scalability” and “self-service.”

In 2014, Veeam® released Veeam Cloud Connect as part of Veeam Availability Suite™ v8. Veeam Cloud Connect was a new technology that allowed the easy creation and consumption of off-site backup repositories. It was the first solution specifically designed around service providers, both from a technical and a business point of view. The extreme ease of use combined with the powerful capabilities within Veeam Cloud Connect made it an instant success. Within the first year, more than one thousand service providers began offering off-site backup services based on Veeam Cloud Connect.

Veeam’s mission is to enable every company in the world to operate as an Always-On Business. In response, Veeam has pioneered a new market of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™ to help companies solve the challenges of keeping their business up and running at all times. Veeam Availability solutions provide recovery time and point objectives (RTPO™) of less than 15 minutes for all virtualized applications and data.

Organizations are modernizing their data centers so that they can provision IT services faster, strengthen security and control, and lower operating costs. While building modern data centers, organizations invest in server virtualization, modern storage applications, and cloud-based services. However, businesses are facing new demands from end users, including access to data and applications at all times and systems with no downtime or data loss. In addition, they are facing exponential data growth annually.

Globalization has become the norm. The exploding use of mobile devices and the Internet now requires most businesses’ websites to be constantly available. Additionally, employees need 24×7 access to corporate resources. These types of requirements drive the need for increased levels of availability and recoverability for your business services. Downtime can be extremely costly. A 2014 Gartner study called “The Cost of Downtime” revealed that the average cost of downtime for businesses was $5,600 per minute, which roughly equates to $300,000 per hour. That particular study was an average across all businesses. For many organizations, it can be much more. For instance, according to a Forbes article, a 30-minute outage for Amazon in 2013 cost the company an estimated $3 million in lost revenue.

This whitepaper is intended for a technical audience that understands how Veeam® Backup & Replication™ works. Additional knowledge about Cisco® UCS® and Cisco Unified Fabric is useful but not required.

Veeam Backup & Replication provides an architecture where different components can be scaled out simply by adding additional components. To maximize backup and restore performance for the entire system, the Veeam Proxy and Repository roles need to be balanced. Doing so allows Veeam to provide availability for the data, ensuring the lowest recovery time and point objectives (RTPO™). A performance-optimized architecture is key to reach that goal. This whitepaper will rely on the following simplified model of a modern data center.