A podcast on ‘What is Vembu upto??’ was aired on vDestination on 31st July 2018. In that episode, Greg W Stuart, the owner and editor of vDestination.com, chatted with Nagarajan, Director of Product Management at Vembu. The podcast was about what we are up to in the Backup and DR space, and what to expect from us at the upcoming VMworld 2018. This is a follow-up blog post for those who prefer reading to listening, summarizing what was spoken on the podcast.
Listen to the Podcast here
Greg: Please do introduce yourself and tell us about what you do at Vembu.
Nagarajan: I am Nagarajan, the Director of Product Management at Vembu. Talking about Vembu, we were established in 2002 and we have been providing backup and disaster recovery solutions to customers across 100+ countries since then. We were offering solutions to Managed Service Providers and from 2014, we jumped into the consumer market and started focusing on small and medium businesses. We launched Vembu BDR Suite to cater to the business needs of SMBs. It comprises of products that can backup physical as well as virtual machines. We also provide on-premise and cloud deployment.
Greg: The biggest pain point for customers has been cloud adoption, especially government organizations. What do you think about data being deployed in the cloud? Do you think it’s a viable solution? What’s your take on cloud service providers like Azure, AWS and the like?
Nagarajan: Many small businesses have already started adopting Cloud as their backup target. Though enterprises are still reluctant to make the big move, cloud adoption is certainly on the rise when it comes to small and mid-sized businesses. Keeping that in mind, we offer Cloud backup solutions like Vembu OnlineBackup, Vembu CloudDR and Vembu SaaSBackup. The backup data is transferred to the Vembu Cloud, which resides on AWS S3 Bucket. We have datacenters in US East, US West, Europe and APAC regions. The data center will choose the nearest center to store customer’s data. Security being the major concern for organizations regarding the Public Cloud, we encrypt, compress and dedupe data at the block level to alleviate those concerns.
Greg: Is AWS the backend of Vembu Cloud? It is being widely adopted now, I believe.
Nagarajan: Yes, that’s right. We also offer different deployment scenarios in addition to the Cloud. Customers can backup and store their data on-premise, or they can store one copy on their premises and replicate a copy to the Vembu Cloud. We offer hybrid Cloud adoption – meaning they can also replicate data to their own account residing on any other Cloud like Azure or IBM Cloud.
Greg: What is the percentage of people that choose to backup to Vembu Cloud against having their data on-premise?
Nagarajan: When it comes to small businesses, almost 40-50% of our customers prefer backing up to Cloud to keep either primary or secondary copy.
Greg: That’s a pretty good percentage. I know from my experience that government organizations wouldn’t want to move to the Cloud as they are concerned about quick recovery. They also have pretty strict SLAs that require them to have the least RPO possible. So what is the RPO offered by Vembu and what is the speed of recovery with your product?
Nagarajan: We offer an RPO of less than 15 minutes, though it can be reduced to 5 minutes if requirements are so. When we consider image level backup of physical or virtual machines, snapshots cannot be scheduled very frequently as they affect the production load. That’s why we have an RPO of 15 minutes. We also offer Changed Block Tracking (CBT) , which tracks and backs up only the changed blocks. So this speeds up the backup process. For backing up VMware, we use the inbuilt vStorage APIs while for physical Windows machines and Hyper-V backup, we use our own CBT driver.
Greg: What kind of threshold do you have for network lag in milliseconds?
Nagarajan: I do not have the exact value. Though when we tested in our environment using 10GB of data, we had about 10-50ms of network lag. This may change depending on the infrastructure. We also developed our own patented file system – VembuHIVE for storage management. While all the vendors store data at the file level, we store it at the block level. This provides better performance, better stability and a good deduplication ratio.
Greg: Tell me a little about replication – is it synchronous or asynchronous? Does it run on schedule or is it a set-it-and-forget-it kind?
Nagarajan: We provide asynchronous replication every 15 mins. We are working to provide synchronous replication. VMware has already released APIs to support synchronous replication. Our R&D team is currently working to support it – I believe by the end of this year we’ll start providing support for synchronous replication.
Greg: That’s interesting. Is there anything related to vSphere 6.7 that would affect your software?
Nagarajan: We are the first vendor to support vSphere 6.7. We released a new update – v3.9.1 that could backup VMware VMs upgraded to version 6.7.
Greg: Have you noticed any troubleshooting issues with v6.7?
Nagarajan: Yes . There were backup failures due to the upgraded v6.7. So we released a beta build to support it and gave it to our trusted customers. About 20 customers tested the build and we fixed the issues. I’d like to thank my engineering team who worked diligently to resolve all the issues. With the recent update VMware provided encrypted VMs. The main pain point that we face is that VMware is constantly making changes to improve performance and security.That is another challenge for us as a backup software vendor.
Greg: Walk me through the installation and configuration of Vembu. Is it agentless or agent-based installation? And does it require a lot of administrative overhead?
Nagarajan: Not at all. Just download the software from the Vembu website and install it on a Windows or Linux system. It has a web based UI. It is a completely agentless backup. Physical Windows backup is agent based but VMware and Hyper-V backups are agentless. All the backup jobs can be managed from a single console. Vembu BDR has a simple and straightforward UI and it was designed so that any junior IT admin could set it up easily.
Greg: Do you support VMs running on Acropolis?
Nagarajan: Not right now, but we have already looked into it. It is definitely on our roadmap.
Greg: So right now you support VMware, Hyper-V and Linux KVMs?
Nagarajan: For Linux KVMs we provide agents which can be installed in any VM to be backed up. Also regarding recovery, Vembu provides an RTO of <1 minute. You can instantly boot any backed up machine - virtual or physical, on hypervisors like VMware, Hyper-V and KVM. We’ve even got customers using our software to migrate from physical to virtual environment. That’s another pain point that we are solving for IT admins.
Greg: Do you have a home lab version or demo version that we can download and set up?
Nagarajan: We provide NFR licenses for vExperts which can be obtained by filling up a form. We have a free edition with which users can backup unlimited number of VMs. There are no feature restrictions for 3 VMs and later only limited features for rest of the VMs that are configured for backup. Also, any number of workstations can also be backed up for free.
Greg: There’s so much focus on the enterprise class that SMBs often get ignored. It’s good that you have an option for SMBs where they needn’t have to shell out a lot of money to protect their data.
Nagarajan: I’d like to mention a customer story here. A construction company from South Africa spent a huge amount every year to backup 1500 to 2000 workstations and 40-60 CPU sockets of VMware with a backup software vendor. Now after they’ve moved to Vembu, They are backing up all the workstations free of cost and they are paying only about 1/5th of that amount per year to backup their VMware VMs. This is the message I’d like to convey, that we are on par with companies like Veritas, Veeam, StorageCraft and Commvault. We are equal to any enterprise level business while also being affordable enough for SMBs. Brand awareness is our main problem, so we are creating awareness, attending vendor conferences like Microsoft Ignite and VMworld to establish our name in the market.
Greg: What can we expect from Vembu at VMworld?
Nagarajan: We have been attending VMworld for the past 5 years. Last year we announced the Standard edition of Vembu BDR Suite. This year we are planning to announce the BDR Essentials for the Standard and Enterprise Editions at the conference. Any small businesses having 6 CPU sockets or lesser can get an Essentials license and cut down on their backup expenditure. Additionally, Vembu provides 24/7 free support along with all the products updates and upgrades. It also includes all quick recovery options like instant VM recovery, Instant File level recovery and Granular level recovery for MS Applications.
Greg: What can we expect in the near future with the backup and disaster recovery industry?
Nagarajan: Small businesses are moving more towards the Cloud. Achieving a minimal RTO is not easy in Cloud. We are going to solve this in next edition. We are planning to provide instant boot in AWS for any VM or physical machine. We also have plans to extend it to Azure and IBM cloud too. We have been having talks with a few storage vendors providing Software Defined Storage who want to integrate our product with theirs. Many educational universities like to keep their petabytes of archival data on Cloud. Though we offer tape for archival, nowadays enterprises have also started considering the Cloud for data archival. Adoption of hypervisors like Acropolis and KVM is also booming. We have an eye on things and we will also be launching support for those hypervisors as soon as possible.
Coming to physical machines, we recently had a customer using our software to migrate his machines from virtual to physical environment. So, we’ll continue our support for physical machines as well. Recent statistics say more than 80% of the small businesses are not using a proper backup solution. Within another 5 years, every business will adopt a proper backup software. Due to ransomware attacks, many small businesses are starting to consider adopting a backup software. We have a separate roadmap for Mid sized & Enterprise Businesses, so we partnered with storage vendors like HP and NetApp to provide storage level snapshot for primary and secondary storage.
So that brings us to the end of the podcast on Vembu. Hope you enjoyed it! If you have any queries to be answered, please drop a comment below and we’ll revert ASAP.
Vembu offers a 30-day free trial of Vembu BDR Suite. You can choose among the 3 editions available – Free, Standard and Enterprise, and you can evaluate them without any feature restrictions . You can also switch between editions during the trial period. Download the software from our website by clicking here. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
If you face any issues during the evaluation, please contact us through vembu-support@vembu.com
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