The fastest solution from HPE and Veeam gets even faster

[StorageExperts]

The fastest solution from HPE and Veeam gets even faster on an immutable Linux backup repository!

Recent lab tests demonstrate how backup performance gets even faster on HPE Apollo as a hardened, immutable Linux repository for Veeam Backup and Replication. According to Veeam technical blogger Chris Donohoe, this means HPE and Veeam customers can have everything they want in a data protection solution – security, performance, and convenience.

There have been lots of changes to the storage industry throughout many years of my career. More features. More capacity. Easier manageability. The most pursued feature is speed. Understandably, customers aren’t willing to reduce the speed of their business. That’s true for every aspect of business, and data protection is no exception. Explosive data growth requires a data protection solution that’s fast and easy to manage.

So, it should come as no surprise that end-to-end backup speed is a key performance indicator when choosing a data protection solution. Your production environment may be fast, comprised of speedy servers (HPE’s compute portfolio includes some of the fastest) and high performant HPE primary storage systems that deliver an excellent amount of data throughput to production applications. However, if your data protection application relies on a slow backup infrastructure, you’ve got a bottleneck for backup jobs.

HPE Apollo 4510My colleague Federico Venier, Technical Marketing Lead for Veeam at HPE, already proved the high-speed performance of the HPE Apollo 4510 when he showed it could achieve backup speeds of 11.4 GB/s. Here is a link to Federico’s blog featuring test details. With all the Veeam roles loaded on an HPE Apollo running Microsoft Windows, this is a high performing, all-in-one platform, which interests commercial and enterprise customers alike.

With the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v11, Veeam introduced Hardened Linux Repositories. This feature enables customers to use the HPE Apollo as a hardened, immutable backup repository running Linux and only the Veeam Backup Repository processes. Because of the different compute requirements, we were curious if this would have an even further impact on performance. To test this theory, Federico ran his testing again with the Apollo 4510 installed with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.4.

We weren’t disappointed with the results. In fact, the backups ran with even greater throughput of 12 GB/s!  What was different between the first test and the second? It comes down to operating system and installed software.

Test 1: Microsoft Windows

• HPE Apollo 4510 Gen 10
• Operating system: Microsoft Windows 2019 Server Edition
• All-in-one configuration (all Veeam roles installed on one server: Veeam Backup Server, Veeam Backup Proxies, Veeam Backup Repositories)
• Connectivity to source data: FC and LAN

Test 2: RHEL

• HPE Apollo 4510 Gen 10
• Operating system: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Ubuntu 20
• Only one Veeam role loaded on the HPE Apollo: Veeam Backup Repository role
• Veeam Backup Server and Veeam Backup Proxy roles loaded on other servers and configured to appropriate specifications dictated by Veeam sizing guides
• Connectivity to source data: LAN only

The hardware configurations between the two tests were not too different. On the Linux hardened configuration, Veeam recommended installing only the Repository, and not installing the Proxy component for security reasons. This configuration is more secure because it reduces the number of opened ports and the potential attach perimeter. Without the Proxy, the FC HBA is not necessary, and Federico’s team removed it. As long as all the backup traffic was routed across LAN, they could replace the HBA with a 100GbE network card. We were curious to discover whether the lack of the Veeam Proxy component would reduce the overall performance.  As the second test proved, performance remained exceptionally high – even slightly higher than before.

But – Enough with all the details. What about that 12 GB/s?  Well, you can see the screenshot from the Veeam backup job below.

Veeam backup job demonstrating 12 GB/s throughput

These results are very exciting because they show how administrators can backup to Veeam immutable repositories on the HPE Apollo 4510 at extremely high speeds. With other solutions, you often have to compromise performance and convenience for heightened security. In this case, HPE and Veeam customers can have everything they want – security, performance, and convenience! The performance even caught the attention of Veeam’s SVP of Product Management, Anton Gostev. In the Veeam R&D Forums Digest last month, he wrote:

Following the famous HPE Apollo 4510 based all-in-one backup appliance performance test with V11 a few months ago, we received many requests to repeat the same test with a Linux-based backup repository on the same hardware… Federico Venier of HPE has just completed the testing of V11 Hardened Repository in the same lab as the original test, using RHEL 8.4 as the repository OS. The only difference is this time there was no backup proxy role running on the Apollo server to simulate the recommended "hardened" configuration. Federico was able to achieve 12GB/s peak backup throughput, so just a wee bit faster than 11.4GB/s he saw using Windows. Judging from the bottleneck stats, the repository server is far from being saturated and should be able to ingest data even faster.

Resilient protection against ransomware – and fast recovery

This kind of performance is just one more reason for customers to adopt HPE data protection solutions with Veeam, especially for protection against modern threats such as ransomware, a topic that is a top priority for IT organizations of any size. With new cyberattacks reported every day, it’s critical that your business be prepared to protect data and recover it as quickly as possible. Small to midsize customers can achieve effective data protection with a single HPE Apollo system with Veeam Backup and Replication; larger enterprises might want to deploy the HPE storage system as a building block for larger configurations using Veeam Scale Out Backup Repository (SOBR) to seamlessly aggregate the capacity of multiple HPE Apollo systems into a single pool.

HPE and Veeam continue to have a great partnership, and I enjoy being on a team that creates such amazing solutions for customers. To learn more about our data protection solutions, take a look at these webinars I recorded with Parissa Mohamadi, Technical Marketing Manager at HPE. In them, we explore the changing data protection landscape – including a discussion of increased ransomware threats – and cover the ways HPE and Veeam together deliver application availability and simplicity in our data protection solutions.

• Attend the webinar: HPE & Veeam data protection boosts business outcomes.
• Watch the ActualTech Media webinar: Protect your most valuable currency with HPE and Veeam.
• Read Federico’s blog, covering the first test of the HPE Apollo 4510 Gen 10 solution: The fastest ever all-in-one backup solution from HPE Storage and Veeam.

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Guest blogger Christopher Donohoe is the HPE Alliance Global SA at Veeam, maintaining relationships with HPE Product Management and Technical Marketing teams, and recently responsible for technical enablement of HPE presales and partners. Prior to working at Veeam, Chris was a customer for 20 years, working up from UNIX administrator to Data Center Manager.   

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/veeamenabler/

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