A Blog by Matt Sharpe, Veeam Architect at virtualDCS
Veeam Cloud Connect, both Backup and Replication provides simple, affordable off-site data protection. When configured correctly (and this is where we come in), the transfer of data off-site is seamless and requires minimal manual intervention.
With this in mind, I thought I’d put a blog together for those looking at the role storage plays within Veeam Cloud Connect and our wider partner ecosystem, sharing our best practice advice, based on over 15 years of experience working with Veeam.
Avoiding common alerts
The most common alert we see from within the Veeam Cloud Connect platform is related to storage and is triggered by organisations nearing the configured storage limit of their Cloud repository.
It looks like this:
Although this issue is easily avoided by expanding the disk space, just receiving the alert itself comes with a range of hidden tasks, and costs that organisations don’t necessarily think about.
The hidden cost of storage alerts
After you receive a storage alert from Veeam Cloud Connect, your IT team now needs to spend time reviewing the job, analysing the environment, and then expanding the available storage for the service to run as expected.
Many organisations we speak to are often tempted to increase the storage in small increments, but this itself leads to more frequent alerts as the capacity diminishes and adds more management time for your IT team.
This approach also raises a few additional questions in itself – What happens if this alert is triggered out of hours? What if key team members are unavailable to rectify it? What if a critical restore is required the following day and the job couldn’t complete due to lack of space? One simple way of preventing these alerts is to ensure there is enough additional space available for data expansion.
So, how much storage space should you have free at any one time to prevent this? Well, this depends on the anticipated growth of the organisation.
Planning for growth
It’s not enough to just protect your workloads but you also need to pre-plan for future growth to prevent disruptions. On average, we see around a 5-10% data change rate and increase every day across organisations on our platform. Although this varies depending on the company, it provides a guideline for consideration.
From our experience, we suggest that organisations have an additional 10-20% of storage free within their quota to pre-empt future growth, data spikes and to minimise hidden costs.
We’re here to help
Although these are our best practice recommendations, what’s best for your organisation depends on your goals and objectives as a business. We’re more than happy to speak to you about your requirements and offer our advice and experience around Veeam Cloud Connect Backup and Replication.
Simply email us at enquiries@virtualdcs.co.uk, or call +44 (0)3453888327.
