“Yes, we’ve had another disaster in our remote office”
It’s a problem that’s continuing to plague organizations around the globe. For example, a large global organization was faced with recent outages of their end-user-facing, retail-sales application costing the company thousands of dollars. A mandate from the CIO placed the IT team in a position where they HAD to figure out how to centrally protect the applications and services at their remote office/branch offices (ROBOs), as well as their headquarters (HQ) datacenter.
It’s unfortunate, but this challenge is becoming more and more commonplace in the today’s virtualized datacenter. Senior executives are now demanding centralized, off-site backup AND replication of their many remote offices and datacenters to the HQ datacenter, or in some cases, to the public cloud.
Enterprise organizations have come to discover that there are not many cost-efficient options available that allow them to solve this problem. One option that’s been found is to purchase tape drives for each remote location and ship tape backups to HQ. A second option is to either set up a new or leverage the existing VPN/MPLS connection to each remote office. This would require additional bandwidth to enable the new remote, disk-based backup strategy. Senior executives and IT staff have quickly learned that both of these approaches present significant management challenges.
A better solution, adopted by more than 200,000 organizations worldwide, is Veeam Availability Suite to protect the on-premises virtualized infrastructure. Veeam Availability Suite makes resolving the problem and plugging into Veeam Cloud Connect for the Enterprise (VCC-E) extremely easy.
What is Veeam Cloud Connect for the Enterprise?
You’ve likely heard of Veeam Cloud Connect for Service Providers (VCC-SP). Veeam Cloud Connect for the Enterprise technically operates EXACTLY the same. The only difference is that, within this model, enterprise IT teams operate as the service provider (this is true for most large enterprise IT shops because they share many of the same characteristics). Cloud Connect offers benefits that help simplify several of the ROBO data-protection challenges that enterprises must solve.
Historically, IT had to manage remote connections (VPN) over their corporate MPLS WAN from the headquarters datacenter to each of the remote offices. It’s often cost prohibitive to purchase a connection fast enough to handle the application and backup traffic, which can also result in management challenges. It used to be that if a remote connection to these sites was not available, each location would have to be managed individually. This also ends up resulting in many management challenges! In addition, strict firewall rules at each site and at the main HQ increase the complexity of deploying a remote backup solution. Bottom line? Backing up data from ROBOs to the HQ datacenter simply wasn’t feasible for most enterprises in the past.
Veeam Cloud Connect has solved these key enterprise challenges today by removing the requirement for VPN connections, as well as consolidating all traffic over a single TCP/UDP port for simplified deployment. Traffic traversing the internet is authenticated with TLS and secured with AES-256-bit encryption, which is achieved by Veeam Backup & Replication using a component called the Cloud Gateway. These servers reside within the WAN/DMZ zone of the HQ datacenter and broker the connection between their remote offices, with all incoming traffic natively load-balanced across each of the gateway servers. This traffic is then passed through the internal network interface of the Cloud Gateway to the Veeam infrastructure backup repository for backup or backup copy jobs, or the hypervisor host for replication jobs.
Bandwidth requirements for these ROBO sites is a very costly resource. Some enterprises must even rely on satellite connectivity to the more remote locations. Luckily, VCC-E can leverage a purpose-built, software-based, WAN Acceleration technology, which reduces the required bandwidth by at least 10x!
This way, if there’s an application failure in a remote site, there are many options that allow IT to recover entire VMs, individual items from an application or execute a partial failover of an application in the HQ datacenter. And when true disaster strikes and IT is left with a smoking crater, the centralization that Cloud Connect provides allows IT to execute entire remote-site failover with just a few clicks!
How do I use VCC-E?
VCC-E allows enterprise IT teams to streamline ROBO DR by allowing these sites to send copies of local backups, or even just backup directly, to the central backup repository. As a result, they maintain full control of their data.
VCC-E can be consumed using three approaches:
- Most commonly, VCC-E is installed in the HQ datacenter. This allows the Enterprise to centrally operate and manage the Availability strategy for the entire organization. This is accomplished by having the ability to quickly restore VMs back to the original location, or even to the HQ datacenter in case of a complete disaster in the remote site. For the most critical remote locations, IT can create replicas of the VMs for fast failover and minimal RTO.
- If the HQ datacenter lacks the required storage capacity, leveraging a public cloud provider, like Microsoft Azure, becomes a great option. In fact, the VCC-E appliance is ready in the Azure Marketplace for deployment today, while Express Routes to Azure data centers are being deployed all over the world! If you’re a current Azure customer, you can easily deploy the pre-built Veeam Cloud Connect appliance and provision cloud repositories for all of your internal “tenants,” such as the HQ datacenter and ROBOs.
- Sign an agreement with a regional, national or worldwide hosting provider that can offer the enterprise-dedicated or shared Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources in which to run VCC-E. This allows the enterprise organization to own and manage the service offering (off-site backup and replication) without having to own the maintenance of the compute, storage, networking, HVAC and electrical components.
Veeam Cloud Connect for the Enterprise sample deployment
There are many pros and cons to each of the above approaches, and that’s why it’s important to keep in mind that the technology behind VCC-E is flexible enough to fit into any one of these three deployment options.
How do I get VCC-E?
VCC-E is available immediately for existing Veeam customers with at least 100 sockets of Veeam Backup & Replication. And for a short period only, you can try it before you buy it with a FREE 6-month production key for an unlimited number of VMs — all without any up-front commitment. This limited-time offer provides current customers with a unique opportunity to test-drive Veeam Cloud Connect for the Enterprise and decide if it addresses their ROBO or off-site DR needs.
