Backups

I’ve been using Veeam Backup for Office 365 since somewhere around November 2016. Being part of the Vanguard program, I was afforded an early glimpse at it. I quickly found that I was getting some great use from having it though. Although generally smooth, I do occasionally run into issues. Most recently, I ran into an interesting error message while exporting a mailbox: Unable to read beyond the end of the stream. Definitely not an intuitive message, however it does sound like some sort of read issue. Being the type of person that I am, I immediately took a look to see if I could fix things myself before evoking support. ...

One of the big draws towards any cloud-based storage is expandability: you aren’t responsible for maintaining drives, adding shelves, or even for the cooling and caring of the arrays. The biggest downside is typically speed. Moving data to the cloud usually means that what used to be sub-millisecond to access can now take significantly longer. ClearSky Data saw this challenge and wanted to provide a solution. We went for a bit of a deep into their storage offering at Tech Field Day 14 in order to get a better understanding of how their platform works. ...

ClearSky Data was founded in 2014 with the goal of simplifying primary storage by turning it into an on-demand service. They set out to accomplish this by leveraging both on-premises and cloud technologies, and by tossing a bit of flash storage in there, they came up with a fairly nifty solution. LIVING ON THE EDGE Prior to being invited to Tech Field Day 14, the name ClearSky Data did not ring a bell, but some research has turned up an interesting product / service offering. What ClearSky Data offers is a tiered storage solution: an on-premises appliance (handily enough called the Edge), warm storage (located ’nearby’), and cold storage (AWS S3). The Edge appliance, which is the caching / performance tier, is located alongside your compute. It contains a pool of up 24TB raw of flash storage used for caching hot data and can scale up to four appliances. ...

I love talking about Veeam with folks, whether it is at a VMUG, the Veeam User Group I run, or even over a couple of drinks. Many of these talks lead to folks finding out about features that may not be all that well known (and for the record, it is not uncommon for me to find out something new). For example, did you know that Veeam Backup & Recovery has a vCenter plugin? Do you know what version it was released in? (the answer is V7). ...

One of the great features that Veeam has is the ability to easily off-site your backups and replicas for you. This can be done in a few fashions, such as using a backup copy job to move data to different media, or you might use the replication feature to move a copy of your VMs offsite. Reminder: replicas != backups; corruption will just be replicated. ...

Veeam recently went GA with their Backup for Microsoft Office 365 product, and like a lot of folks, I’ve been looking forward to it. I was fortunate enough to be involved with the beta, so I knew going into it that setup would not take long (just a couple of minutes really). What I didn’t test a heck of a lot of though were backup locations. The Problem Veeam Backup for Office 365 UNC Error ...

Recently, when I attended the Toronto vForum, I found myself hanging around the Veeam booth … a lot. I know quite a few of the local folks, so I enjoy chatting with them. They also work with me on my Veeam User Group, so sometimes the conversation steers that way too. But, I also have a passion for helping people. Given that I usually have some form of Veeam swag on, it isn’t uncommon for me to get questions from folks who assume I’m an Systems Engineer. I am always very quick to point out that I don’t work for Veeam, and I find that usually changes the tone of a conversation. Folks like hearing from customers, the good and the bad. I’ll usually try and loop an SE is as well since a) it’s not my booth and b) they will have different experiences and potentially different suggestions. ...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post covering Tintri’s recently announced synchronous replication. At the time, I was also given a walkthrough of another upcoming feature: snapshot replication to S3 data stores. This is another big feature that I was glad to see previewed at VMWorld, and even more excited to see an in-depth demo of. For a quick bit of background, S3 is Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Storage Service which is an object storage system. Although S3 was designed by Amazon, there are many providers out there that offer S3-compliant data stores. This is definitely an emerging market, and the fact that you can have cloud-capable data stores in your datacenters has it’s own curiosities. All of that, however, is beyond the scope of this post - I just wanted to point out that AWS is not the only S3 provider. ...

The first stop for us at Tech Field Day 12 was Cohesity’s office, where we had a nice breakfast waiting for us (along with a great delegate gift consisting of a multi-end USB cable, a notebook, a portable battery, and a Polaroid Snap camera). Soon after settling in, we got straight down to business. I had previously written a ’ primer’ regarding Cohesity, and I saw them present recently at the Toronto VMUG, but I still wasn’t fully familiar with the brand or their offering. Cohesity markets itself as secondary storage, a market that its founder, Mohit Aron, felt was being underserved. Without repeating everything from my previous post, the common use-cases for secondary storage include data sets such as backup targets, cold data, and test / dev. ...

Today I was fortunate enough to present at the Toronto VMUG. That’s two talks that I’ve given at the TO VMUG this year - not bad considering I only started ‘participating’ in the vCommunity earlier this year! As always, I see these opportunities not only as a way to give back to the community but also as a way to practice and develop my own skills. I am constantly trying to improve my public speaking - I have found that the key for me is to be able to turn my presentations into a conversation (admittedly it is a one-sided conversation). It still takes me a bit of time to ‘slip into’ that mode, but I’m definitely getting better at it. ...