Veeam Universal storage integration with Pure Storage has various options for performing snapshots and backup for primary applications, and one of the use cases is Veeam Pure Snapshot offload to NFS.
What does FlashArray Snap to NFS means?
It is self backup technology built into the FlashArray, it comes with no additional software license, and it has all data management level features such as preserving compression while transit and data reduction capabilities across snapshots. For more information on Snapshot offload to nfs please visit this link.
Veeam snapshot offload feature is supported on Purity 6.3 and above, the Veeam snapshot offload job can be configure on the Virtual machine with the corresponding volume on the FlashArray. The Veeam snapshot job will create corresponding volume snapshot with veeam defined retention and the same job is configured to offload to secondary target with it’s own retention timeline. The offload snapshot feature can serve as a long term archiving for years and it can serve to restore the entire snapshot to original FlashArray and later can be restored to the original Volume. The recovery of archive snapshots can be performed from the Veeam backup and recovery storage infrastructure via browsing to the volume of the primary storage and selecting the archived snapshot to restore.
Check out this video on how you can configure a snapshot offload job on Veeam with Pure Storage.
Since Snap to NFS was built from scratch for the FlashArray, it is deeply integrated with the Purity Operating Environment, resulting in highly efficient operation. A few examples of the efficiency of Snap to NFS are as follows:
- Snap to NFS is a self-backup technology built into the FlashArray. No additional software licenses or media servers are required. There is no need to install or run a Pure software agent on the NFS target either.
- Snap to NFS preserves data compression in transit and on the NFS target, saving network bandwidth and further increasing the efficiency of inexpensive NFS storage appliances, even the ones without built-in compression
- Snap to NFS preserves data reduction across snapshots of a volume. After offloading the initial baseline snapshot of a volume, it only sends delta changes for subsequent snaps of the same volume. The snapshot differencing engine runs within the Purity Operating Environment in the FlashArray, and uses a local copy of the previous snapshot to compute the delta changes. Therefore, there is no back and forth network traffic between the FlashArray and the offload target to compute deltas between snapshots, further reducing network congestion. As a result:
- Less space is consumed on the NFS target.
- Network utilization is minimized.
- Backup windows are much smaller.
- Snap to NFS knows which data blocks already exist on the FlashArray, so during restores, it only pulls back the missing data blocks to rebuild the complete snapshot on the FlashArray. In addition, Snap to NFS uses dedupe-preserving restores, so when data is restored from the offload target to the FlashArray, it is deduped to save precious space on the FlashArray
