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.

Businesses now need to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every single day of the year. Services must be kept online or customers will be lost. In today’s global marketplace, it is critical for systems to always be available so companies can remain competitive and keep their users satisfied. High datacenter availability can be achieved in several ways, but the most common and easiest is through the combination of server virtualization and failover clustering.

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.

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.

Oracle databases are among the most important applications in many environments. Relational databases are used for custom applications developed internally by a company, or as a database backend for commercial applications deployments. In both scenarios, data registered in Oracle databases require a proper design for their availability needs. This involves specific virtualization capabilities like HA, and proper data protection. Availability for BCA is not something that can be applied afterwards as an add-on, but instead a critical component that should be planned for and designed into the overall plan.