Over the past 11 years, Veeam has become a wildly popular solution for companies that need to back up their VMs, servers, Office 365, and other hosts. The only problem is, with the great amounts of data involved in VM computing, comes great responsibility: While Veeam’s Backup & Replication engine manages full restores of customers’ VMs, based on a retention period defined by you, the amount of on-prem storage this requires is high and acutely expensive for many companies. So what happens when something comes up — like new compliance guidelines or document retention rules — that require you to hold more data from your VMs than your on-prem storage can handle?
“Many of our customers use Veeam and they want a way to extend their recovery points, but don’t have the budget or desire to change their on-prem infrastructure and workflows.”
— Nilay Patel, VP Product, Backblaze
You sized your on-prem storage to handle the number of backups you wished to retain when you launched your Veeam instance. If the number of backups you retain is seven days, then your backups have seven days worth of data. By tiering to the cloud, you can extend your backups further in time. This enables you to pull down subsets of files beyond the period of time your on-prem backups cover.
But before today, your options weren’t all that attractive. You could upgrade to a higher (and more expensive) license with Veeam…and then pay the expensive storage costs of Amazon S3. Or, you could purchase and configure more on-prem hardware. But now you have a new, affordable, seamless option: the B2 Cloud Storage partnership with Tiger Bridge! The solution allows you to back up your VMs in the cloud and easily restore files as far back as you’d like to go, for ⅓ of the price of using S3. This all occurs on a single pane of glass with no interruptions to your workflow — all backup copy jobs and restores are controlled directly from your Veeam Backup and Replication Console.
“Anyone looking to optimize their storage usage will love the integration between Backblaze and Tiger Bridge. Intelligent and automatic data tiering to Backblaze B2 helps increase the number of backups, reduce costs, and increase storage flexibility and agility, without additional, expensive on-premise hardware.”
— Lance Kelson, Executive Vice President, Tiger Technology
Here’s how it works.
Tiger Bridge is a software-only solution that expands Windows NTFS capabilities to include tiering to cloud, other storage, or tape. Once the files are tiered, they are replaced with zero-byte stub files in the NTFS. These stub files are placeholders that allow users and applications to work normally, as if the data exists in its original location. Simply opening or calling for the file triggers a restore. In this way, it is possible to have access to petabytes of data while using a modestly sized local volume.
As the most affordable and scalable public cloud storage platform available — with a robust REST API that is being consumed by 100s of integrations — Backblaze B2 is the perfect tiering solution for Tiger Bridge customers, allowing for infinite copies of their backups in the cloud.
The key benefit with this solution is that you do not have to change your backup job. Instead, you can make a copy of the job and have it executed once the existing backup completes. This is excellent news for anyone who needs for their backup process to be invisible to end-users or for teams that need to create separate retention policies that allow for VM backup storage for any period of time.
Deploying a proof of concept for this solution is simple and takes about 30 minutes:
- Spin up a new VM and install Tiger Bridge, then configure it to use your B2 bucket.
- Create a Tiger Bridge repository within Veeam and configure it as a backup location.
- Create a backup copy job for each of your backup jobs.
After each backup job is completed, the backup copy job copies the backup to the Tiger Bridge repository. As soon as that happens, Tiger Bridge will upload these files to B2 and replace the files on disk with zero-byte stub files. When you need to restore a file, use the Veeam Backup and Replication console’s restore feature. Tiger Bridge will automatically bring back the files you need in a transparent way. You won’t even know the backups being restored are from B2 via Tiger Bridge!
While this solution will have your entire VM backed up in the cloud, you don’t need to download your entire VM to find a file. Using Veeam and Tiger Bridge partial restore, you can search your backed up copies for the file you want and just download that file. If the VM is 100GB and the file you want is 10MB, you only pay to download the 10MB.
Here is a price comparison:
| SOLUTION | $/TB/MONTH | DOWNLOAD PRICE PER GB |
|---|---|---|
| B2 + Tiger Bridge* | $7 | $0.01 |
| Amazon S3** | $21 | $0.09 |
* B2 Cloud Storage is $5/TB/month & Tiger Bridge is $2/TB/month. Tiger Bridge is free for the first 5 TB in any given month.
** Amazon’s S3 has tiered pricing. This comparison uses Amazon’s lowest published price. To create a more detailed pricing comparison, please use our price comparison calculator.
Interested in Learning More?
Visit our Knowledge Base article on how to get started with this deployment or contact our sales team.
