This document discusses the pros and cons of using tape and cloud storage for virtual machine (VM) backups, highlighting their differences and implications for data protection strategies. It emphasizes that while tape systems offer benefits like low acquisition costs and easy portability, they face challenges such as slower data recovery times and increased complexity with larger data profiles. Cloud storage, on the other hand, provides potential for true offsite disaster recovery and ease of scaling, but may come with issues like bandwidth limitations and loss of control over the data.

1. Tape and cloud
strategies for VM
backups
Scott Lowe
Founder and Managing Consultant
of the 1610 Group
Modern Data Protection
Built for Virtualization

2. Tape and cloud strategies for VM backups
Abstract:
Tape and cloud storage targets have their pros and cons. There are many
differences between these two technologies, which we will explore in this paper.
These differences can steer the decision process you may have for getting virtual
machine (VM) backups offsite with Veeam® Backup & Replication™.
Introduction
In recent years, disk-based backup and recovery solutions have become
increasingly popular as organizations strive to meet demanding recovery
objectives (RTOs and RPOs) while providing a solution to easily manage data
protection needs. This has become a more complicated matter in recent years
as today’s datacenter has seen an explosion in the amount of VMs in use,
increasing the data profile that needs to be protected. Tape systems are a
tried-and-true practice for many environments, including large investments in
tape infrastructure.
While cloud storage for many environments appears to be an alternative to
tape systems, there is a significant learning curve associated with adopting
object-based storage in public or private clouds. The overall goal is to provide
the best RTOs and RPOs while reducing costs.
Tape is still viable today
It may not be obvious as one looks around the modern datacenter, but many
of the technologies that people consider cutting edge have roots that may
go back years or even decades. Virtualization isn’t exactly new (while VMware
vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V have made it popular). It’s quite an old practice
from other systems throughout the history of technology.
Like virtualization, tape systems for backup storage have been in use for a very
long time in the datacenter. That’s not to say there isn’t uniform support of
tape systems for backup storage. In today’s datacenters, tape remains a soughtafter backup mechanism as well as a technology others are rushing to remove.
Pros
There are a number of clear benefits to leveraging tape systems for backup
storage. These benefits help make the case to position tape as a desirable
backup target. Let’s take a look at these scenarios.
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3. Tape and cloud strategies for VM backups
Backup portability
For decades, organizational disaster recovery (DR) practices have required
that data be moved to an offsite, secure location on a periodic basis. This
requirement was implemented to prevent a disaster from destroying both the
original data and the backup copies of the data.
Due to their compact, stackable and portable nature, tapes have been really
easy to move to and from a secure location. There are a myriad of ways that
organizations handle this protection scheme:
• Place tapes in a separate building at the same site.
• Ask a trusted employee to store them in a designated location.
• Subscribe to a safe deposit box at a local bank.
• Procure the service of a professional organization that focuses on tape storage.
Historical processes
People hate change. Even IT people, for whom change should also be a
constant, don’t always embrace the latest and the greatest. Further, when
a process works really well, IT people are loathe to make changes. After all,
one of the operating principles of an IT department is to ensure that services
remain stable and in operation.
Tape-based backup and recovery processes have been accepted IT practices
for years.
Ease of use
In general, the longer that a service is in use, the easier it becomes to use.
Modern tape drives are cartridge based, part of an overall simplification trend
to increase the usability of tape systems.
Managing these resources has also become exponentially easier over the years as
tape drives and robotic tape libraries have been developed that automatically read
tape barcodes and interact with backup software.
Low acquisition cost
The reality is, data protection strategies (tape, cloud and beyond) really revolve
around the commitment to the level of investment that an organization will
make. While tape systems can be a substantial investment, tape media has
among the lowest acquisition cost per unit of storage available. Whether that
is measured in GB, TB or more, tape can be scaled out very easily at a low unit
cost per tape.
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4. Tape and cloud strategies for VM backups
Use in conjunction with disk-based backups
Many organizations have invested in disk-based backups to receive backup
data, and then transfer that protection profile to tape. This handoff works very
well with tape because most read and write data is sequential, thus making
performance better.
Cons
Tape systems have been around for a number of years, and undesirable
situations have arisen which encourage people to migrate away from tape
for backup storage. It is important to consider the negative aspects of tape
systems as well.
Throughput challenges
Tape drives, while faster than they used to be, remain relatively slow compared
to disk systems. This is especially the case on any random I/O, which is frequent
on restore operations. Linear Tape-Open (LTO) is one of the most popular tape
formats used in the market. Even the latest version of LTO, which is named
LTO-6, maxes out at 160 MB per second, and this is achieved only under the
absolute best of circumstances.
Tape can’t keep up with exploding data profiles
There are a number of factors contributing, but many organizations have had a
huge increase in their data profile that they need to backup. Therefore, it may
take a lot of tapes (or an additional tape infrastructure investment) to protect
all of an organization’s data assets in the form of VMs. This need to handle
multiple tapes can increase complexity when it eventually becomes necessary
to perform a significant recovery.
Dedicated hardware
Over the years, tape software and hardware have changed a lot as new
improvements are made and as new needs are identified. Unfortunately, as
these modifications are made, long-term problems can be introduced. For
example, an update to a backup software program that uses a proprietary
format may render particularly old tapes unusable. Or, if an organization finds
it necessary to recover especially old data, it might be difficult to locate the
correct tape hardware to read the old tapes.
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5. Tape and cloud strategies for VM backups
Potential for high recovery times
There is an additional potential problem with tape when it comes to recovery,
too. Organizations may find that it simply takes too long to fully recover large
data profiles, especially in a disaster situation in which tapes must first be
retrieved from offsite storage. This may introduce long RTOs, which is why tape
is now often combined with disk.
Short-term recovery point objectives
At the same time, some organizations find it difficult to keep their backed-up
data as current as they’d like. For example, if an organization is doing only
nightly backups, that organization risks losing as much as a day’s worth of
work in the event of disaster or some other negative event taking place. The
RPO defines how much data loss an organization is willing to incur. Moving
everything to tape, every time, will limit the number of recovery points an
organization can manage.
Viable new approach: cloud storage
Cloud means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but in the
terms of managing backup data we’ll focus on object-based cloud storage. For
a variety of reasons, using cloud storage as a backup target can make a lot of
sense, particularly for a smaller organization wanting a simple solution.
In this section, we we’ll examine the pros and cons of using object-based cloud
storage for backup storage.
What is object-based cloud storage?
Object-based cloud storage is materially different than traditional block and
file storage resources provisioned in datacenters. Object storage is a distributed
storage architecture that can exist across a large network of storage resources and
is managed by metadata and APIs from a cloud storage provider.
Pros
Cloud storage is poised to significantly disrupt enterprise IT in the coming years
as it makes inroads into areas traditionally handled by in-house infrastructure.
But, there is a lot of good that can come from such services, including some
major benefits that revolve around backup and recovery.
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6. Tape and cloud strategies for VM backups
Cloud storage is also materially different than traditional storage practices.
Cloud storage frequently leverages object-based storage instead of blockbased or file-based storage. This is a different type of storage protocol than
what many organizations have used in their infrastructure practices historically.
This is beneficial because there is no concept of managing storage in terms of
capacity, RAID levels or file system considerations.
True offsite disaster recovery
Perhaps the most notable benefit to cloud storage-based backup is the
ability to get backups off site without the need to invest in a revolving door
of hardware solutions. On the software side, many of today’s modern backup
and recovery software vendors include cloud storage as an integrated, native
backup target, so there is no need to invest in complicated bolt-on third-party
software to get off site.
Compared to tape, it’s much easier to get offsite redundancy with cloud
storage-based solutions.
Significant choice
Depending on the backup and recovery software used, there may be support
for a large number of different cloud storage providers built into a backup
and recovery tool. These vendors include: Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Azure,
OpenStack, Rackspace, Google, HP Cloud, Clodo, Haylix, Scality, Dunkel, Tiscali,
HostEurope, DreamObjects, GreenQloud, Seeweb, Connectria, Walrus, and
Mezeo. For those considering backup and recovery software that leverages
cloud storage, the software solution should be able to integrate with a local
cloud provider that might also be leveraged to meet other needs.
“Unlimited” capacity
While there are always limits, when it comes to cloud, for customers, there is
a practically unlimited resource pool from which to pull storage capacity. As
customers require additional space for backups, there is no need to go through
a complicated purchasing and deployment process. Simply contact the cloud
storage provider and request that they provision more storage space. It doesn’t
get much easier than that!
Costs are clearly calculated
Scaling cloud storage from a cost perspective is very easy to calculate. Over
time, the retained backup data will still consume a cost, but the cost per GB or
TB may be appealing.
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7. Tape and cloud strategies for VM backups
No media to handle
There is no physical media, so there is no media to handle. Processes that
currently call for a service to pick up tapes or for someone to deliver tapes to a
safe deposit box can be eliminated. The ability to back up to cloud storage also
simplifies the environment and reduces the risk of errors, such as accidentally
erasing or overwriting the wrong tape.
Cons
While it may seem like the perfect solution, every approach has positive and
negative attributes. There are challenges to adopting cloud-based backups, as
it isn’t the right situation for every environment.
Limited bandwidth
Moving web content and email around the internet is one thing. Moving
backup data profiles around the internet is another. Many organizations may
lack the bandwidth to get backups to the cloud, either in part or in whole. The
bandwidth may be there, but other services like email and web traffic may
already stake a significant claim in the available internet connectivity resources.
This can make recoveries take a long time as well, particularly if a major restore
process or complete disaster recovery becomes necessary. This is where cloud
storage-based backup can be particularly problematic.
Potential loss of control
Don’t forget that moving to an external provider may mean that there will be
some loss of control over the service. Only when a solution is fully internal can an
organization really maintain complete control over everything that goes into the
service. Once leveraging cloud storage, the provider can change rates, change
service parameters, change communication interaction (APIs) and more.
Outage risk
Whether a cloud storage provider goes out of business, there is a bandwidth
outage or the service is not available, there is an outage risk. Mitigating this
risk is a challenge, as there could be a relatively large data profile.
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8. Tape and cloud strategies for VM backups
How can Veeam help?
Tape and cloud storage are valid options for getting backup data off site, but
making the best decision will depend on a number of factors. In fact, it may
even leverage both!
Veeam Backup & Replication gives you options for getting your VM backup
data off site. With Veeam Backup & Replication v7, Veeam listened to its
existing customers and introduced tape support. Veeam Backup & Replication
Cloud Edition also supports writing backups to cloud storage.
Native tape support with Veeam Backup & Replication allows VM backups to
be written to tape from backup repositories. Backups are taken from VMware
and Hyper-V VMs to a Veeam repository. When the backup job is complete,
the restore points (contained on disk in a .VBK file) of the VMs are written
to tape. Veeam Backup & Replication supports LTO-3 or newer tape drives
as standalone drives, tape libraries and virtual tape libraries (VTLs). Media
management with media pools are also provided with the native tape support.
Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition can write Veeam backups to over
15 cloud storage targets. Veeam backups are written to an existing backup
repository first, and then transferred to a cloud storage provider. The transfer is
compressed, encrypted and logged in the Veeam console.
If you need to put backups on tape or to write your backups to cloud storage,
Veeam can help. Go to Veeam.com to download a trial of Veeam Backup &
Replication now.
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9. Tape and cloud strategies for VM backups
About the Author
Scott Lowe is the founder and managing consultant of the 1610
Group. He is a 17-year veteran of the IT world. Scott is also a
frequent contributor on a wide range of topics to such outlets
as TechRepublic, TechTarget and virtualizationadmin.com. He's
a huge believer in the business benefits that can be had
through the appropriate use of virtualization.
About Veeam Software
Veeam® is Modern Data Protection™ - providing powerful, easy-to-use and
affordable solutions that are Built for Virtualization™ and the cloud.
Veeam Backup & Replication™ delivers VMware backup, Hyper-V backup,
recovery and replication. This #1 VM Backup™ solution helps organizations
meet RPOs and RTOs, save time, eliminate risks and dramatically reduce capital
and operational costs. Veeam Backup Management Suite™ combines Veeam
Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE™ into a single integrated solution to
protect virtualization investments, increase administrator productivity and help
mitigate daily management risks. Veeam Management Pack™ (MP) extends
enterprise monitoring to VMware through Microsoft System Center. Veeam also
provides free tools for the virtualization community.
Founded in 2006, Veeam is privately-owned and has been profitable since 2009.
Veeam currently has over 19,000 ProPartners and 73,000 customers worldwide.
Veeam’s global headquarters are located in Baar, Switzerland and has offices
throughout the world. To learn more, visit http://www.veeam.com.
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10. Tape and cloud strategies for VM backups
Modern Data Protection
Built for Virtualization
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Veeam Backup & Replication
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