A whole lot of Google Cloud love this V-Day

What a whirlwind of a couple of weeks it’s been here at Veeam! With the launch of V12, so many exciting enhancements have been delivered to help organizations secure their backup strategy and improve recovery across hybrid cloud environments. Part of that includes a host of new capabilities in Veeam Backup for Google Cloud v4 delivered on Valentine’s Day! So, let’s dive in to exactly what’s new.

 

Native Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL backup

I hope that by now, we all understand the notion of shared responsibility; it’s your data, therefore your responsibility to protect and secure it. As more organizations turn towards PaaS to power their applications, native tooling for protecting that data is essential.

V4 expands Veeam’s support to protection of fully managed databases to include PostgreSQL, joining MySQL support availability via V3. This is achieved with both cloud-native snapshots AND image-level backups stored on object storage. Seasoned backup professionals know that there are critical differences between the two mechanisms. While snapshots — often referred to as “backups” by some vendors — offer a great first-line of defense, they are not the be-all-end-all when it comes to a robust backup strategy.

 

The good	The bad
Offers low recovery point objectives (RPOs) for finer control over point in time recoveries. Offers low recovery time objectives (RTOs), enabling faster resumption of business operations in the wake of deletion or outage.	Not independent of the source instance. If the source is compromised, the snapshot will be too, rendering us with nothing to recover from. Snapshots incur some of the highest storage costs for public cloud resources, making us choose between retention or budgets.

On the other hand, an image-based backup captures the entire image of the Cloud SQL instance (including its configuration, databases and items such as users and stored procedures) as multiple files to a separated storage repository, and in Veeam’s case, object storage in a different project and/or region. With data separated like this, if production and the associated snapshot were to ever be compromised by ransomware, deletion, corruption and more, a viable path to recovery is still available from a true backup. Not only this, but object storage is significantly cheaper than snapshots, meaning we can retain more data for longer without any sort of overspend. The following diagram illustrates well how Veeam protects Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL databases.

Of course, all the same goodness you’ve come to love with Veeam’s cloud-native offerings stand, including policy-based automation for ease, fine grain control over entire instance or database restores and security measures like cross-project backup, least privilege IAM, encryption and more.

 

Enterprise management and scalability

Any organization managing a resource hierarchy of multiple organizations, folders, projects and resources on Google Cloud knows what a headache managing backup and recovery inevitably is. That’s why in V4, we’ve introduced a litany of new features aimed at reducing management overhead for these kinds of environments, while improving scalability, including:

• Cross-project service accounts and Google Folders as a policy source, allowing for your entire environment to be protected by a single appliance.
• Optimization of internal backup appliance tasks to reduce the number of API calls made, also reducing the associated costs.
• Scalability improvements to the code base, allowing for more Google Cloud resources to be protected by a single appliance.

The diagram below shows how a single appliance in its own project can protect all resources spread across multiple other projects, folders and organizations.

New Google Cloud Storage Tier 

For those with a keen eye, you might have noticed Nearline Google Cloud Storage was included in the PostgreSQL diagram. Yes, this tier is now supported within policies alongside Standard and Archive for Compute Engine VMs and Cloud SQL databases. Support for Nearline storage offers a low-cost, highly durable storage service for storing infrequently accessed data, e.g., aging backups. Nearline storage is a better choice than Standard Storage in scenarios where slightly lower availability, a 30-day minimum storage duration and costs for data access are acceptable trade-offs for lowered at-rest storage costs.

 

License portability

V4 also introduces direct acceptance of a Veeam Universal License (VUL), as opposed to entitlement via connection with a Veeam Backup & Replication server. This broadening of entitlement designs further enhances license portability for those organizations on the tail end of a 100% migration to a single cloud and no longer require a Veeam Backup & Replication server.

 

In closing

Veeam Backup for Google Cloud is now better than ever, and I’m excited for what the future holds as we develop the product further. There are many more features included in V4 that:

• Enhance security through modern authentication mechanisms to mail servers, and verification of SMTP mail server certificates in the main UI
• Boost performance with load control when sending data to backup repositories to prevent unnecessary throttling from the public cloud
• Enhance reporting by splitting up backup and archive tasks into separate sessions for more granular visibility
• Expanded service provider capabilities through remote management and monitoring of the Veeam Backup for Google Cloud appliance

If you’d like to see all this in action and more, my colleague and good friend Andrey Zhelezko hosted a deep dive demo a couple of days ago that you can watch on demand here. Or, for a more personalized experience, chat with one of our cloud experts today!

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