Qumulo Certified as Backup Target for Veeam 12

By James Walkenhorst, senior technical marketing manager, Qumulo, Inc.

Qumulo’s Scale Anywhere storage platform can easily host exabytes of data in a single namespace.

Qumulo’s multiprotocol portfolio includes object (S3) support along with the NFS and SMB protocols – all part of our quest to be the primary storage platform of choice for all your unstructured data, anywhere.

But did you know that a lot of enterprises also use the company as the preferred on-prem platform for their secondary data as well? Turns out, its simplicity and performance make it a place for storing your backup data – even data from other platforms, like virtual machines, application servers, and from structured sources like SAN volumes.

Qumulo and Veeam
If your enterprise uses Veeam as your backup solution, you have another reason for considering Qumulo as your backup target: The product is officially certified as an SMB and S3 backup repository for Veeam v12, and you can expect to see NFS certification very soon.

This means that you can combine the power of Veeam’s backup solution with the scalability and simplicity of Qumulo to protect data across your entire enterprise, regardless of where it comes from: SAN, NAS, application servers, VMs, and regardless of whether it arrives via object or SMB from the backup engine – if Veeam can back it up, Qumulo can store it.

Qumulo Certified As A Backup Target For Veeam 12 Scheme2

If you think about it, there are a lot of reasons why the firm makes for a better backup target than even a dedicated on-prem S3 array: you need a high-capacity storage target that can easily absorb terabytes of backup images on a daily basis. On top of that, you probably have 12s of backup servers/engines across your enterprise, all streaming backup data around the clock. Beyond just raw capacity, you also need a multipath storage solution that can absorb all of those streams concurrently, with no bottlenecks or single points of failure.

There’s more. In today’s IT universe, you need a solution that can multitask – one that not only provides peatabytes (even exabytes, if that’s what you need) of storage capacity for all your backup data, but one that’s also capable of hosting your active unstructured data workloads at the same time.

Flash-level throughput AND deep storage capacity
Vendor’s architecture makes it even more compelling as a critical component of any backup strategy. On a hybrid cluster, all incoming data, regardless of source, is written to flash storage and continuously monitored by firm’s intelligent file system. While active data is retained in the flash layer, cooler data is flushed to disk.

For your day-to-day workloads, this means 2 things: 1) you get flash-level throughput for all write operations, leading to faster backup performance even at scale; and 2) you can co-host backup services alongside your production workloads on the same cluster, knowing that your active data will benefit from flash speeds, while your backup data is automatically moved to more cost-effective disk storage. Therefore, even for your backup jobs, you’ll get the performance of flash at the economics of disk.

As cool as that is, though, it isn’t the only factor in company’s high-speed backup performance. Its Scale Anywhere architecture gives you a modular cluster, built using anywhere from four (basic) to 265 individual nodes that all contribute capacity and network connectivity to the cluster as a whole.

By adding nodes to your Qumulo cluster, you’re not just adding more storage capacity; you’re also adding more network paths to support even greater throughput.

More engines + more paths = more throughput
As your enterprise grows, you can add more Veeam backup engines to protect your new services, effectively distributing the backup load across literally dozens of unique network paths to the cluster, leveraging our flash-first write model to ingest data as quickly as your Veeam backup engines can stream it out. There are no bottlenecks, no single points of failure, and no limits to the scalability of your Qumulo storage.

And for all that, compare the cost/TB/month against either a dedicated, on-prem object array (no flash-first performance, fewer multitask opportunities) or cloud-based object storage (with attendant ingress/egress fees and longer time-to-first byte), and you may find the economics are in Qumulo’s favor as well.