How WAN Acceleration Will Help Your Network

Backup and Data Migration to Virtual Machines

Information management and best practices will, at some point, lead you to migrate applications and data to cloud-hosted files for both backup and disaster recovery. Virtualization platforms help optimize your data and your workforce. Virtualization also reduces operating costs, increases IT agility and responsiveness, and provides better business continuity. In addition, virtualization simplifies data center management and eliminates downtime, reducing the need to deploy multiple servers that may function inefficiently.

WAN Bandwidth Optimization in Backup and Migration

The process of virtualization, however, can introduce other issues. Backup and replication involve moving huge data caches between remote sites. Insufficient bandwidth and duplicate files can cause delays, costing you valuable time and money, and leave your data vulnerable. Today, the process of backup and recovery has been revolutionized with programs and software solutions made to address these next-gen operational challenges. Veeam Backup & Replication is built on the VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors. In addition to fully automating the backup copy process, Veeam Backup & Replication fully automates the process, allowing you to specify retention settings to maintain the desired number of restore points.

How Does WAN Acceleration Work?

Veeam Backup & Replication also offers WAN acceleration technology. The Veeam WAN accelerator addresses the most common issues that backup administrators face during offsite backup and replication, including redundant data and insufficient network bandwidth. The Veeam WAN accelerator bandwidth solution combines multi-streaming upload, network traffic compression, global data deduplication, and variable block deduplication. WAN acceleration also helps improve user experiences, resulting in faster application performance and quicker data retrieval as well.

Veeam WAN Accelerator Service

After Veeam Backup & Replication decompresses backup files to analyze content, the Veeam WAN Accelerator Service on the source WAN accelerator individually analyzes your data blocks within the transferred files. It then creates files with digests for these data blocks, storing the created files and digests in the “VeeamWAN” folder on the source WAN accelerator. The backup file data or virtual machine (VM) data is then compressed and copied to the target side. Veeam Backup & Replication can perform deduplication processes with the VM itself, or deduplicate the redundant data blocks within every VM disk. In addition, the Veeam WAN Accelerator Service on the target WAN accelerator populates the copied data blocks to the global cache storage.

Minimizing Duplicate Blocks

Within the next job cycle, the source WAN accelerator uses the Veeam WAN Accelerator Service to analyze the file’s data blocks to be transferred, creating digests for these data blocks. Veeam WAN Accelerator Service compares these digests with the previously stored digests within the “VeeamWAN” folder on the source WAN accelerator. If duplicate blocks are found, the data block on the backup file is not copied. Instead, it is taken from the global cache. Once identified, it is written to the restore point to the backup copy folder or on the target data volume. The restore points that had previously been copied to the target side are then analyzed by Veeam Backup & Replication. Duplicate blocks are not copied, instead, they are taken from the previously copied restore points. Because of this process, Veeam Backup & Replication only copies new data blocks to the target side.