Quick Overview of Who We Are and Our Data Protection Requirements

Modern Data Protection with Nimble Storage and Veeam Backup & Replication – Wed 4th Dec 2013

Quick overview of who we are and our Data Protection Requirements

Welcome everyone, thank you for asking me here to speak about our key reasons for choosing Nimble Storage and Veeam Backup and Replication.

First off who are we - Transform Medical Group is the Largest Cosmetic Surgery provider in UK – we have been established for 39 years and turn over £45M that’s around $70M. We have offices in 26 cities in the UK and have 450 employees, we operate from two Private Hospitals and most importantly for this presentation; we have two Data centres. One based centrally at our ISP the other at our largest Hospital in Manchester, it is from here that other office functions such as Human Resources, Finance and IT are based.

We run a very small IT support team, with just four staff to look after our Multi-Site Estate, and as such we need to adopt Easy to Use AND Full Featured Products at every opportunity. Hence I our choice of Nimble Storage and Veeam Backup & Replication.

We are fully virtualised, with only three physical servers in our estate: a Domain Controller located at each Data Centre and a single Backup Server with an 8 Tape AutoLoader attached.

We run around 60 guest Virtual Machines, split across the two VMware Clusters – this is managed centrally using just one vCentre Instance. Our 2 Clusters are based at each of our physical Datacentres, each one with their own local SAN Storage.

In addition to this, our Backup Strategy includes two Virtualised Veeam Proxy servers which handle the Backup & Replication Tasks at each site.

Just to give you some idea of the type and volume of data which we store at Transform; across the two sites we manage approximately 10TB of Live data (shown in Green), this is predominately unstructured files; Word, Excel, Power Point etc..

We also store 2Tb of Hi Resolution Images which we must retain for legal reasons (shown here in Blue).

Our Veeam Backup repository, which consists mainly of Reverse Incremental images totals around 4.5Tb (Yellow).

In addition, we also leverage the native Nimble Snapshots. These offer us an alternative method of restoring Data, with a different Restore Point Objective, they also add an extra level of redundancy to the environment. Currently this data totals around 1.5Tb (displayed in Grey)

We increase our Data Volume by around 5% each year. This is steady growth, and is well within the capacity of our Storage. Much of our business is contacting, maintaining and tracking our ¼ million customers – this is managed centrally by our SQL CRM.

The challenges we Faced

During 2013 our particular Industry was the subject of a number of high profile government reviews. We expected that the consequence of these reviews would be along the lines of Sarbanes-Oxley, for the Private Healthcare industry. Specifically we expected the legislation regarding data retention periods for electronic patient records and other related data. This unknown “Data Retention” factor also added unpredictability to our long term archiving requirements.

Before we looked at Nimble Storage we looked at some other, more Traditional Archive vendors, who may be suitable to fit our ever changing requirements, but we faced two main issues:

· Fixed Archiving limit

o Dedicated Archiving solutions are generally specified on day one with a finite capacity, estimated by a combination of Past Data Growth and Future Forecasting. We would be forced into choosing to spend a substantial amount of Captial budget on an Archive product, along side our budgets for Storing Live Data. If either solution ran out of Space or Performance before we were able to complete our Return On Investment timeframe. Then we would be in a position where I would have to go ‘cap in hand’ to the Finance Department, trying to justify additional purchases. This is not a position I wanted to be in.

o Also, these solutions appear to not be Dual use, Archiving Solutions are great for just that, storing data – but any spare capacity can not be used for Live Data. <next>

o Finally the devices we looked at were not expandable – what you buy on Day One is what you are stuck with. Adding more space was not possible. This may not be the case with all products – but in the Market we were looking, this appeared to be the case. <next>

· No published/Public Compression Stats for Veeam

o The biggest problem with Archiving Vendors is that they sell their products based on how fast they can Inhale, Compress and De-Deupe their Data Sets. The real life problem is that all these compression ratios are very subjective and dependent upon the actual Live Data you are working with. Typically they quote SQL or Text based Data which is highly compressible.

o One of the main limitations that we saw, was that Vendors recommended that we should turn OFF the Native Veeam compression. This recommendation is unfortunate as it completely removes any ‘extra’ Compression or De-dupe that Veeam is capable of achieving. <next>

o Finally, no vendor would publish Veeam compression statistics – they stood by their regular Compression Figures which may or may not be achievable with real data.

next>How Nimble fit in to the Equation

When reviewing our Storage and Backup Strategy, we initially planned on purchasing two devices: a Fast Data SAN and a Purpose Built Archiving solution. Our thinking was that traditional vendors sold their products into nicely defined silos, whereby you bought into a well established Manufacturer, and then in to a Product line which best suited your Budget and Archiving predictions.

Interestingly, over the last 18 months or so, this Storage and Archiving Market has been radically changed, as new Disruptive vendors have entered and begun to respond quickly to Customer Requirements.

Storage has been looked at again and re-designed from the ground up. The introduction of RAM, SSD & SATA has created a “perfect storm”, by de-staging Slow Disk Spindles from the ever increasing Fast Data Interfaces. This approach has brought a Radical Change in relation to Storage, IOPS and ultimately Cost.

With all this happening in the market I had lots of concerns about the Hard Limits imposed by two separate devices. I wanted more flexibility.

These Smaller Vendors in the market were offering Hybrid solutions with Faster Development paths, these new devices appeared to give me what I wanted.

Nimble Storage exemplified this Seismic Shift in the industry, and as a consumer of Storage the combination was very interesting. It began to answer my concerns about the limits previously discussed. We appeared to be looking at a product which was flexible enough to offer a Hybrid solution to our Data Storage AND Data Protection requirements.

How Veeam fits in to the Equation

We first started using Veeam shortly after we virtualised our Server estate some 5 or 6 years ago. As I said earlier, with a small IT team it is important that any product we purchase, especially something as important as Backup; needs to be Simple to Use, Provide Lots of Features and is Cost Effective to the Business.

We quickly became comfortable with the product and used many of it’s features to provide a strong Backup Solution to our business. The installation consists of a Veeam Backup Server, which is the centre of the architecture (shown here at the top of the screen), a number of Proxy Servers and a Datastore Location to actually place the Backup Files on. <next... then wait

Prior to the release of version 7, we also Licensed a traditional Backup solution which we retained for many years, in order to place these Veeam backup files on to Magnetic Media.

This introduced an extra level of complication and layer of management, especially in the event of a restoration from Tape. next

Fortunately this is now no longer required! The Veeam Backup Server and Proxy Appliances now feature Direct Tape Support as part of a Grandfather, Father Son Backup schedule. In addition, WAN acceleration has been added to the feature set, more about that later.

The removal of the 3rd party Software has simplified the management of the whole process, and has saved something in the region of $15,000 per year in additional Licensing.

Benefits of Combining the two Products together

When I was first asked to come up with something to talk about in support of Nimble and Veeam in a 15 minute session, I was unsure of what topic to discuss. We have already heard about the many features that are available such as Veeam Agentless backups, vPower and SureBackup, and how Nimble’s CASL optimises the Reads and Writes through the layers of RAM, SSD finally on to Disk.

I felt that it was especially difficult knowing what to say, as I have no idea on who would be in the audience, and at what technical level is appropriate – normally I would be asking a few question and gauging the responses. In the end, I decided that the best use of the time would be to concentrate on one particular aspect of the Nimble and Veeam partnership, one which shows how these products uniquely complement each other.

To explain this further, I would like to give you an insight into the Veeam Proxy Appliance which I have spoken briefly about already. The Appliance is deployed as a Windows Service and provides an optimal route for Backup and Replication traffic between locations. It can exist on a physical or virtual machine – but in my case I have opted for virtual. These Proxies utilise the Hot-Add feature of VMware, to access the virtual disks on the storage.

One of the Features of the Veeam Proxy, is the ability to Replicate Virtual Machines between sites.

The appliance does this completely independently of the Hardware used at each end. This Replication process gives us the confidence of knowing that my Environment is held safely in a second location on separate Hardware.

These Virtual Machines can also be Powered up rapidly from Disk without having to resort to slow Traditional Tape Recovery.

The Nimble Storage Array assists in this process in two ways:-

Speed – When using Disk as a medium for storing your backups, although compression is important, even more important is fast Data access. This is essential for rapid recovery, be that of individual files or whole environments. Sustaining High IOPS for your storage array ultimately reduces the Recovery Time Objective. Nimble arrays can be scaled to match your exact requirements, by Capacity, by IOPS or a combination of the two using Scale-Out architecture.
Flexibility - Each Volume that is created on a Nimble Array is completely customisable by choosing from a number of Pre-Defined attributes or by selecting your own combination. The flexibility of allowing you to turn Compression ON or OFF, Caching On or OFF and even Tune the Block Size for particular work loads makes the device incredibly versatile. These features are not always available when you look at Traditional Storage Vendors, let alone when compared to conventional Archiving Vendors – Nimble can offer a Hybrid solution in one 3U box.

In practice, our Veeam Proxy servers are installed as virtual machines, one in each Data Centre. They are configured with a VMDK boot disk, and two additional iSCSI partitions. Using this design, I am able to leverage the flexibility of the Nimble Volume Profile.

As I said, the Boot disk is a traditional VMDK, the Volume profile for this will be inherited from the Volume which holds the Proxy Virtual Machine.

The second partition is used for WAN Acceleration, this is a Software layer that Veeam have created which reduces the amount of traffic which is passed across WAN links. The technology involved is specific for the Veeam Backup Jobs and uses a Global Dedupe Cache. This Cache is stored locally with each Proxy at each of the WAN link and used to ‘reduce’ the transmission of any duplicate data to the other site. As such, the Volume profile used for this disk is NOT Compressed but IS Cached – further adding to the processing speed.

Finally my 3rd iSCSi disk is the actual Veeam Backup Target. This Volume is defined as Compressed but NOT Cached. This gives me the combined benefit of Veeam Backup De-dupe and Nimble Storage Compression. These three volumes in my eco-system are independently managed by the Nimble Array, but presented to Veeam using the Windows iSCSI connector.

In essence, what I am hoping to show with this brief overview, is how the Veeam Proxy sits nicely with Nimble Storage – each one offering functions which the other can optimise and enhance.

The fine grained control over how each Volume can be tuned, is a very powerful feature.

Within Transform we have used this Volume flexibility to review each of the services which we deliver to our end users. By analysing traffic and how information is accessed, we migrate data to individual Volumes each with specific Performance Profiles. It is important to realise that different Services require different underlying policies. E-mail, File and Print and Hi-Res Images all require subtly different sub-systems.

What is most important to remember is that these changes are at a Software level not at a Physical RAID level.

Bringing my section to a close, I would finally like say that the challenges which we faced when first looking in to traditional backup solutions are now gone.