Transcript
Thank you. Thank you. Hi, Gideon. So, welcome to our webinar on building resilient backup and disaster recovery at scale with OpenEBOLA and VEEAM. In this discussion we're going to be having a panel discussion where we're going to be asking questions both of VEEAM as our partner and expert in backup and disaster recovery. As well as one of our customers and I will be introducing them forthwith. So, today it's going to be myself. I'm a solutions architect with OpenEBOLA and we're joined by Andres Dudler and Bradley Bishop. And Bradley is from Encore Technologies and he's been using both OpenEBOLA and VEEAM and he adds a very specific perspective around how the solution would work in a real enterprise type environment. So, this is our agenda for today. So, we're going to be looking at introduction to the two companies. A little bit I'll give both of them an opportunity to introduce themselves and their companies and then we're going to start talking about the context. How did we start this engagement? What was some of the stumbling blocks they might have had? How did they solve it with the solutions in place? What was their experience? How did OpenEBOLA help? And then just towards the end we'll actually have a Q&A session where we will take questions from the audience where we can discuss any specific questions you might have on this topic. So, let me start with the introduction. So, I'm going to pass it on to Andres and Andres can actually just go a little bit through the details around how VEEAM would be working together with companies like OpenEBOLA and what their vision is around backup and disaster recovery. Andres? Thank you so much. Yeah, hi everyone. Thank you for joining. My pleasure to be here with you today. Just like I wanted to provide the general slide about VEEAM for those of you who haven't heard about the company. It's like we are well known in data protection and data resilience spaces. I believe for the last 20 years we've been like working hard to make sure that our customers they can kind of get the best industry data protection experience. We have a lot of customers. We have a lot of partners including technological partners including OpenEBOLA and we're going to touch on that a little bit later. But yeah, we're just generally happy to be here and happy to represent VEEAM today and have a conversation with you. Perfect. Thanks Andres. And let's move on to introducing Bradley. Bradley Bishop. Bradley is from Encore Technologies. Bradley, take it away. Hi everyone. Happy to be here from Encore Technologies. Brad Bishop, I've been working with Encore for about 10 years. Basically, I manage all of our internal systems that support everything we do internally, our users, as well as all of our data center facilities. I also work directly with customers to, in general, find solutions and help manage anything that is needed. Encore Technologies is a data center provider and managed services provider. So we do a little bit of everything. We have four facilities in the Cincinnati area and one more remote still all in the US. But we also help customers manage facilities, do colo type of work. We also do many professional managed services, one of which is a BaaS solution built on top of VEEAM. And we also help customers with professional services like managing VMware environments, helping manage and set up OpenEBOLA, all that stuff. So kind of been around for a while doing a bunch of things. Perfect. So I think we spoke a little bit around this, but these are the two methodologies. And I think we'll be discussing this in a little bit of detail because you're not just using VEEAM for the sake of backup. You actually also use it as a migration tool, right? Correct. Yeah, we've been working with VEEAM for a long time and it was able to solve a couple problems for us. So we are 100% migrated at this point away from VMware to OpenEBOLA. That's at all of our facilities, including all the off sites for data center only. In general, we used one swap in our main facility. That's because that's where our backups are located. That's where we have the most space and, you know, kind of everything was good to go. It was one-to-one. We were able to set up another environment to move VMs really quickly. And that worked really well for us. We have certain data center workloads that are harder to move. They control all the data center functions. So all of our AC condensers, cracks, power load, all that when it switches to backup generators. So while those things can handle some data loss, they need to be online. So, you know, taking them down for a long migration across the wire was really difficult for us. And that's where we were able to use VEEAM to pre-stage that stuff because it didn't matter if we had gaps in the data. What mattered is the system was online. So we were able to do that and VEEAM ended up being crucial for that because not only did it handle kind of the slow connections from our main facility to our off sites, but it also enabled us to keep the systems online while we were doing our migrations, which was huge for us. Perfect. Yeah, that's obviously very, very helpful, especially at downtime is a critical consideration. So I'm going to ask both Bradley and Andrei to join me and we're going to be asking some questions. So this is specifically around the context of this engagement, right? So how did the engagement start? So my first question is going to be to Bradley and it would be, what were your requirements for backup and recovery and what made them difficult to implement? So basically sketching the scenario that you were in. Yeah, so, you know, like I said, we touched a lot of different systems and we needed something that was resilient, you know, production ready, has been tested, but covers a huge surface area, right? You know, we have at the time we had multiple hypervisors. We have several different operating systems. We needed to do database backups, Microsoft 365, some Azure workloads, and even being able to do agent based on physical servers. And, you know, in a perfect world, that's one platform, right? You know, it gets tough to stitch things together. And, you know, certain things are good at other certain products and other things are good at other things. And it just gets really complicated when you're having to use multiple tools and managing that all together. So we really wanted a single tool. And, you know, with how security is changing every day, things are getting tough. You know, we really wanted a provider that had some solutions for that and was keeping up with, you know, updates and all the security landscape. Got it. Yeah, I think it's one of those things that sometimes we don't always realize that it's an ever changing landscape and you need solutions that can actually adjust and change and evolve with the landscape, right? So my follow up question to that, and I think related to that is going to be to Andre around, is this a common problem that you see with other customers that you talk to? Yeah, obviously, that's a really common issue today. And we've been trying to address it, frankly, because, like I said, 20 years ago, when we started the company, it was particularly for one platform, which was VMware. And then we had a solution that was just was able to help customers using VMware. But over the years, we realized that, hey, they're moving, like, first of all, and then it's not just they're moving. They're like, they're having like a fleet of services that they're covering with the rise of software as a service, a lot of like SaaS platforms around. They also wanted to have like kind of a unified approach towards, you know, the data protection situation. And this is what we had to deliver. So yeah, this is very common. And this is what we see. And we're, I know, we're going to touch my slide a little bit later. But yeah, we have like a lot of platforms that we cover these days. And one of the biggest challenges is to make sure that, you know, the user experience is kind of unified in a way that, you know, that one particular guy or the girl can go and open the console and can see what's going on between those systems. And then he or she would be able to, you know, to kind of drill down, like adjust the policies, perform the recoveries and things like that. So yeah. So a bit of a follow up question on that to you, Andre. And it might sound like a pretty obvious one. But I guess that you seeing that that massive changeover from VMware, and I obviously remember when it was VMware, mainly the solution that you were supporting, right? Did you see that? Does that coincide with the advent of Broadcom? Or is it something that you started seeing even before that? I don't believe. Well, there was a different way before Broadcom situation. But the different wave was related to people migrating to the cloud. I would say that was the major thing happening a few years ago. That was like, what everyone wanted to talk about. And then, well, I don't, I don't believe we're going to cover it today. But then it's like entirely different problem. At the end of the day, they're also changing the platform, the underlying software. But then it's also like brings a lot of unexpected cost spending, and like different situation in order how to like refactor the applications that they were using. So it's like a little different. But yeah, these days, I don't like really see it like that, like, happening like a lot, just because it feels like the transition has been done. And some people, frankly speaking, they were, they're talking about cloud into creation, and getting data out of the cloud. Like back to on-prem, it's just, you know, this like ongoing cycle. But yeah, Broadcom kind of made or escalated the situation even further. And now we have a lot of virtual kind of more of a traditional players, virtual platforms, and like, wanting to kind of play this game and to move VMs around. And then that's what our customers want to do. Of course. And that makes sense. So let's start talking about the solution that you found, Bradley, and as well as your experience. And I'll obviously ask Andre for some commentary around this as well. So I guess my first question to Andre is around, how would you see a modern backup solution fit into a cloud architecture? And I think we kind of touched on public cloud. And in this case, we're talking about a bit more of a private hybrid cloud scenario. But I guess architecturally, it's similar. So how do you see a modern backup solution fit into those types of architectures? Okay, so probably my take would be like this one. Let's go to the next slide, where we see the platforms we're covering these days. So one of the things I would like to point out is to obviously to modern backup solution software should support not only one or two or multiple, it's like a lot of platforms. And it's not just supporting the platforms. I think one of the key elements here to the support is to be able to move the data between those platforms designed in the way the data would be changing. For example, if you're moving them, I don't know, like a virtual machine to the cloud, you need to make sure that it's actually it's not like you're just like moving the backup. You're doing it in a way that it's actually running in the cloud. So it's not like, you know, like all the like the drivers and injected all the like the platform specifics are like designs to be addressed properly. So that's one take. And then, like I said before, I guess kind of a unified approach towards that particular data cycle. We call it data cycle because data is moving everywhere. No, that makes perfect sense. And I'm going to put you on the spot again and ask a question that's maybe not specifically within the scope. But I see on the slide, you're talking about containers, right? And I think we obviously have got quite a lot of investment and we're starting to look at Kubernetes because I think that in the market Kubernetes and containers are starting to take off. And I guess that you're seeing this as well from from a backup perspective, because the reality is people are starting to move workloads from virtual to containers and therefore the backup requirements need to grow there as well. Yes. So to answer to that is obviously containers are on the rise. I would say we on the rise. I would say we also with the cloud wave, the next wave was like containers wave, but the common misconception here among those like different spheres and platforms and services, you know, whenever you touch it, it's a couple of things. So first of all, it's the default option is like typically a default option. You wouldn't use it or you would use it for the first three days. And then you would need to something a little bit more sophisticated. So regardless of the platform. And the second is that typically it's kind of a shared responsibility model. So typically it's related to the cloud and SaaS, but also partially related to like those additional services. So it's like typically the customer or the company business like working with the data and using platform in order to store the data into or to like to process it to kind of to work with it. So, well, he or she, the customer have to take care of the backup themselves and, you know, make sure that the, you know, the data is protected and it's secured in a way that they're able to recover it. And they should not fully rely on the underlying like platform, regardless what it is. And like the same happened with containers. So people were expecting containers to be, you know, the golden grail to like to solve the issues. But then it's additionally brought like the new set of like challenges related to refactoring of applications, related to data protection. And we are still addressing this. Understood. Yeah. It's always trying to think that the next big thing is going to solve it. But at the end of the day, it comes down to the fundamentals, right? Yep. Cool. So a question to you, Bradley. So seeing as that we were talking about architectures and talking about backup within an architecture, how did you approach solving this conundrum and what actually worked for your specific environment? Yeah, I actually like Andre's slide because I think that it really is illustrates the approach and just how we've all grown into this, right? You know, when we first started, you know, we built Encore on VMware. That's what I learned on all of that. So our original approach was the Veeam snapshot integration, right? That's what's worked for us at Encore for, you know, eight years now. And then over time to Andre's point, you know, we layered in more things. So we layered in some agent backups for our physical servers and we started doing some app aware stuff for databases. And then, you know, we even went into some of the SaaS apps like Office 365 and stuff like that. So, you know, our approach was always kind of, you know, all over the place. We had a bunch of things all still in Veeam, but, you know, using the different features. So when we decided we were going to transition to OpenNebula, unfortunately, the integration didn't exist at that point. I think we installed six initially. So we decided to just switch everything over to agent backups. That wasn't a big lift for us. We had the agent stuff already set up. Even if we didn't, though, you know, setting up agent backups is not complicated. It's really just pointing it at a different repo, really. So that was good. We were able to stick with our backups, our solution provider, and using all of the same stuff. So everything else worked. Like Andre said, you know, the backups kind of followed themselves. So from my engineer's perspective, it didn't look any different. Really, the only thing that we saw was we needed a small bump in resources, switching from, you know, snapshot base, which was essentially agnostic to the VM. You know, it didn't even know anything was happening to running that on the VM. We needed a small resource bump. But honestly, that was a price worth paying. And it really wasn't that much of a resource bump to begin with. And it kept everything in Veeam and working exactly as we expected it to. Perfect. So I think that Bradley kind of answered the question already somewhat. The essential role of Veeam in that transition. Yeah, like Veeam helped that. I think that was the role. I think it's an interesting concept here is that what a lot of people don't realize when it comes to backup solutions is that at the end of the day, you're only as good as your tools. And Veeam is a very powerful tool, but it comes down to how you use it. And I think, Bradley, in your scenario, you were sketching the fact that, okay, so there were certain limitations that have now been addressed. But because the tool allowed for certain functionality, you were actually able to keep the same type of infrastructure in place. And it was, in essence, quite seamless for you, purely because you have a tool that is flexible and versatile and can actually fulfill various different needs. Exactly. And I mean, when we're talking about something like a big migration, like what we were going through, there is already so much changing for all of my engineers. So if I can not change another product as a part of that, that's a huge win. Yeah, completely get that. And I think that this is simplifies in any way the question, because I think that from your experience, I mean, this is basically the way that things work, right? So the solution stays in place. You've got a few cornerstones. You don't want to overtrain your staff or retrain them because you already have to retrain them on the hypervisor, especially running a solution that you've been running for years, and now you need to change it. So you want to try and minimize everything else, correct? Correct. And I think I stated this before. This is also something that we offer to our customers. So we have several customers that using Veeam like Veeam. We like Veeam. So we were able to stay with a very cohesive solution across the board. Would you say that at the end of the day, it's important because obviously, you're not talking about just internally, as you were saying, you were positioning this to customers as well, is to have a cohesive solution stack, to say that this is a solution that we're through and you basically advise, you play the trusted advisor to customers to say, this is what we recommend. And at the end of the day, customers need to go with that. And if they follow your recipe, it actually works. Yeah. I mean, we'll work with the customer on whatever solution that they have, but we are very much an eat your own dog food type of organization. If, especially being in managed services, right? Like I'm in this with you, we're here together. I'm going to walk the path with you. And I'm going to try to come up with the best solution to get us to the end of that road. And Veeam is the perfect solution for that. Yeah. Got it. And I think another question to you, and this is where we start introducing OpenAVILA into the mix, because up to now we were talking about your scenario and we were talking about how Veeam could help, but how does OpenAVILA help integrate backup and recovering to day-to-day operations? Yeah. With the latest release and going back to snapshot-based, we're able to realize some resource savings, which is always good. And going back to it just being a thing that happens, right? With it being integrated from a snapshot-based, it takes a lot of indecision out of it. Are my VMs being backed up? What's the latest copy? Did backups happen? All that good stuff. With agent backups, while that's pretty easy to go look at, it requires manual intervention. Someone has to tell Veeam that there's a new agent to go do a thing. And that's not asking a lot, but people get busy, things get missed. But with snapshot-based, we don't have to worry about any of that, right? It's just you back up everything that's in the hypervisor. It's there. It runs every time. You can see it. It's all integrated. So you just take that burden off of the engineers, and then everything's more streamlined, and it still works the same. And even, I would say, recovery is a little bit easier in that scenario as opposed to an agent recovery. But it all still works, and it takes load off of the engineers. Yep. That makes perfect sense. And I think it's important to understand that it also streamlined the way that you do things going from how you had to use agent. And then, obviously, OpenEBLA actually starting to add the functionality, and there are some changes coming to this. And I guess that Andre and I will talk a little bit about that later on, because obviously, the idea here is that OpenEBLA is a supported platform, and there's certifications involved. And the point here is that from an integration perspective, we need to make sure that our platform, whatever we do, is certified by Veeam, and that's something that's in progress. And that also then, at the end of the day, helps the user experience when somebody like Bradley needs to use it, right? So it's not just something that we build and we say, we can do this. At the end of the day, there's multiple views on this to make sure that it functions the way that it should. So that kind of leads me to my question to Andre, which is exactly around that, right? Around how do you assist with certifications? Because you've obviously got a certification program. And to make sure that, I mean, you showed earlier that you support multiple platforms. And I guess that certification is almost critical for those type of to make sure that the user experience across multiple platforms would still be the same, correct? Yeah, absolutely. And Heyn, I think we have to kind of unveil the, you know, the curtain a little bit here, because obviously, we've been talking about OpenEBLA and Veeam working together. And Bradley, here's a good example of a real world company doing that and benefiting from it. But the current state of things is that we're working on a better solution, on a solution that is going to be like re-architected in a way. And then OpenEBLA will be like visible in the user interface, like more precisely. And yeah, I know that from the development side of things, because we have two teams working together, like communicating and just making sure that, you know, all the requirements are met whenever there is a requirement. And then, you know, whenever there is someone like an end user would take that solution and use it for his own production data, you know, he or she would be happy about it. So yeah, that's like work in progress right now. And then one of the slides that I used, the previous slides had a little asterisk over there. So it's yeah, I kind of hope that soon we'll be able to like show how it like, you know, looks like and how it works exactly. Like I would say the GIMP plus OpenEBLA 2.0. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to go into too much detail because I don't want to steal other people's thunder. But the fact is that thanks to the feedback from Veeam and customers, we and I know there's a question from the audience that popped up here. And thanks to feedback, we are enhancing our product because at the end of the day, it's about user experience. And we updated the way that our driver works so that it fits closely within the scenario on how Veeam prefers backups to run. And this also then means that with the next release, or yeah, I think it is the next release that's coming very soon, we will be able to actually unveil a much cleaner way of doing backups. Not that the current way is not working, but it's much more aligned with the way that customers would be experienced. So this is a question to both of you. And this is something that I see a lot of talking to customers and obviously having spent a little bit of time in the backup world. What's the biggest mistake organization make in backup and disaster recovery? I can think of a few. The biggest mistake I see is that organizations don't test their recovery methods. So I know when we switched from snapshot-based to agent-based for the bulk of our VMs, we had to write up a completely new document on how we expected people to do those recoveries. Not that it was overly hard or anything like that. It was just different. And I don't want to be learning those things when something's broken and I actually have to do a restore. I want to do it when we have time to do the dev process, to check things, make sure everything's right. And that's the case across the board. As we add new products, as we do app-aware stuff, all of that has to be tested and documented so that when the chips are down, we know how to do the restore. So basically making sure that you've got your playbook ready so that you know what the RT and RPOs are. So basically test backups when things are working, test recovery when things are so that when you get to the crunch, you don't have to start from scratch. You already know the playbook. Right. And I would even say, take that almost a step further, we've seen small changes with just normal Veeam updates. I think it's an evolving thing that we need to be in the practice of just regularly testing our backups. Yeah. And I guess that I will extend that question to Andrei, because I think you see a lot of customers who have challenges. Backup companies are never the most valued until a point comes where a customer says, I just lost all my data, please help me build a new backup solution. solution. I guess that's a scenario that resonates with you, right? Yeah, for sure. I would really I guess that's a scenario that resonates with you. like to echo what Bradley said about deciding for recovery and testing the backups. It's absolutely that you're not doing backups for the sake of the backups. You're doing it to just make sure that when you need those, you should be able to, and then you're better to test them before that happens. But if we go to the next slide, I think I got one more point to cover. It's like, think of the backup as a utility that doesn't need any maintenance, doesn't need any attention. But I would argue that it's not like we even had to switch this language a few years ago, because it wasn't like data backup or data protection anymore. It was more of a data resilience. And backup is just a part of that data resilience situation. So we have introduced a lot of features over the last few years. And then these days, it's like, it's not just the backup is lying around that I would be able to recover it. But then we're seeing the bad actors, for example, doing their attacks to different environments, breaching the customers and then exporting, extorting the data. And also, I don't know, like exposing it in a way that's, you know, it's like publicly available. So it's like, well, I'm not going into that rabbit hole. But I'm just saying that we truly evolved as a data resilience company. And we offer a lot of interesting features. And some of them are mentioned here. And those are not the features that are enabled by default. And that would be the kind of challenge, right? Oh, so I installed the backup and, you know, it's working, everything green, so it's good. No, test it, recover it, run the sure backup, or like go ahead and enable additional features like multifactor authentication, like four eyes confirmation. And it's like a lot of those things. And on this journey of like hardening the backup environment, I would argue it's like a very kind of, it's not an easy journey, but it's worth doing the journey. And yeah, I guess my point here is just to be attentive to security features your data protection solution offers. It's very important. Yeah, and I think this kind of touches on something very interesting, because it comes down to this, and you said something very interesting around data resilience, because it's no longer just about disaster recovery, and data backup, it's about business continuity, and business continuity could happen in a whole bunch of different things like ransomware is one thing, and we're not going to go into too much detail around that. And this is important from an open ebola perspective, because at the end of the day, that's your platform. And then you've got your backup tool, and then you've got the customer, and you need to have something that's resilient. And I think some of these challenges are challenges that we see from a virtualization perspective as well. And I think this is important to have a solution in place that can help you mitigate those. So I'm going to move to the question and answer session. So we've got some questions already that came through already. But feel free to the audience listening in, if you guys have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments. And then Bradley and Andre and I will cover them as they go. And the first one is a little bit of a contentious one. But I think we already addressed it to some extent. And I think it gets to the nature of something that Andre was saying, and I think even Bradley was saying is that it's an evolving space, everything changes. So the question is, as it was recently quite unstable, how positive are you today about using Veeam as a professional open enabler backup system? And I think we answered it already to the extent that we are improving it all the time. And specifically, the reason why we're not doing this on our own, but we're working together with Veeam on this is to make sure that it meets with their requirements. Because if a customer runs a backup solution, it's not just an open enabler name that's at risk here, right? It's the backup solution as well. And we need to make sure that we fit the standards. And that's why we're working together to create the optimal backup driver that will allow us to access the data and also restore it. And I need to stress this with the existing version 7.2.1, we already have a lot of customers using it successfully. And I think Bradley, you pointed out, and I might open the floor to you, you're using the new, or at least the existing Veeam backup tool for snapshots and it works in your environment, correct? That's correct. We haven't deployed it globally yet, but we do have things using it. We are backing up snapshot-based and it is successful. Yeah. And as I said, there's some very interesting changes coming, which will even improve the user experience even more. So you also answered this to some extent, but I'll open the floor to you. How does Veeam assist in adding support for alternative hypervisor solutions? I don't believe we assist. We were just doing that. I think the whole Broadcom situation, it made a huge impact on the market. And we are typically trying to develop Veeam products. Obviously, the part of it is like, we're trying to be visionary and we're trying to create something. But then this was more of a responsive way of us seeing, okay, customers are in a panic mode, like some of them are, and then they're looking for alternative solutions. And for us, it was immediately, how can we support them? And I think it's very popular these days, because any company I talk to these days, they're like, okay, we're doing the migration here and there. Okay, that's good. And yeah, I'm just like, I'm happy to say that we are supporting those migrations. And it's not just the migration thing. It's like, we're supporting the whole thing and we're supporting them staying in their newer platform. And yeah, every new version of Veeam data platform that we release on the market, it has much more integration in terms of hypervisors, in terms of how many of them we support. And then I have that slide, it's like the slide is growing. I'm not going to lie, we've been focused on Veeamware because, well, the market was a little bit different. But now we are trying to bring the feature parity. It will be a long journey, but yeah, this is the intention, the feature parity between hypervisors and their full flexibility or full, yeah, I guess, flexibility for the customers to decide what they want to use today. Yep, that makes sense. I mean, the reality is that customers always had choice. I think it was an easy choice before, but now that customers are somewhat forced to move, now, I mean, at the end of the day, customers will dictate what solutions they use. And there's at the end of the day, from your perspective, you just need to make sure that those platforms are supported. And it's a little bit straightforward, because if customers choose specific platforms, then it's one of those things that Veeam will just support it, because at the end of the day, it's your customers and you'll keep those customers to go, for example, like KVM-based solutions, because that's the alternative that's out there. The third question here, I think we already discussed somewhat, Bradley, but this is around the Veeam that you use for migration of VM workloads. I would like to kind of dive in a little bit deeper into that. I guess if you use some specific functionality that Veeam has, that you can kind of play those VMs back while you did the migration of the workload itself. If you maybe can just expand a little bit around how you did that. You don't have to go into too much detail, but just maybe a glimpse into the functionality that you used. Yeah. So, like I said, we had already made the decision that we were going to use agent-based backups when we migrated to OpenNebula. So, what we did was we essentially installed the agent on whatever system we were trying to move and let it take its backup. We let it do a full backup, and then we did a normal agent restore, which looks like you build a VM on the receiving side, and then you use a Veeam-provided ISO to boot that up, and then it restores the VM exactly as it was. And we kind of did that in two different ways. So, like I said, we have a lot of data center systems that just need to be online. They're communicating with the end systems, and they're applying configs. They're making decisions on if it's too hot, using too much power, do we need to switch the backups, etc., etc. So, the data that's on there, the historical data, which it's obviously capturing, is important, but it's not that important to where we couldn't have a gap in that data. So, the Veeam agent stuff worked really well for that because we were able to keep that system online the entire time and restore the new VM in a down state so it's ready to go. And then, essentially, it becomes a cutover. I turn the other one off, I bring the other one up. The data center systems and my engineers, they had maybe a minute of downtime while that was happening, which is no different than just normal patching operations. And then, on other systems where we did care about that historical data, we could do one of two things. Either take the VM offline when we did the restore, just like you would with OneSwap, and really the thing that you get there is just stability of the connections. Like I said, these are off-site locations for me, so my connection, you know, I'm not going to say it isn't the best, we have good stable connections, but sometimes they're not as, you know, performant as two servers in the same data center, right? So, my resource took a little bit longer, all that. Or you just simply restore another backup that's not a full backup, so it takes a lot less time. Or, in some cases, we are seeing some data and stuff like that, but it made those migrations a lot less impactful than, you know, taking it down and moving all the data in real time. That's really the big win that we saw by doing Veeam. But that being said, using this method for restores would work really in any scenario. Yeah, and I guess that if I can ask you for what your recommendation would be is to kind of have a horses-for-courses type approach, where you've got different solutions, you're not going to use all of them, although you could potentially use Veeam, but you pointed out that you used OneSwap, which is the OpenEBOLA tool, as well as Veeam, and it's basically just phasing in the backups using all the tools at your disposal. Yeah, we try to use the right tool for the right job, right? When we were in our main facility, where everything's in the same data center, and you're essentially just crossing layer two type stuff, OneSwap was great. It was really fast. We had good connections, no issues. It went really well. And Veeam handles those things that were not quite that, right? I think the other thing that Veeam would be really good for, which luckily wasn't a situation that we had, but it is a situation that I've discussed with customers where, you know, they're in a colo facility, and you have the hardware that you have, and maybe you can't. You don't have enough hardware to build an OpenNebula right next to a VMware. In this scenario, that would be okay. If you can take that outage, you could take backups with Veeam and then restore them without having two systems set up right next to each other. So, I think that that's another important piece that I've talked to some of my customers about. So, it comes down to, I guess, make sure that when you do a migration, make sure that you plan, and then you know what the steps are going to be, and then you can decide what is the method that you want to use. And you've got a bunch of tools available, but you need to plan this to when to use the correct tools. Right. Perfect. I guess my question is to the audience, if there's any more questions. So, we've got a few questions that we've asked, and I guess we'll keep it open for a little bit longer, but feel free to ask us questions if you've got questions that you want to ask to Bradley, Andre, and myself, specifically around backup and disaster recovery. We're quite keen to assist and to try and answer them as best as we can. I think while we wait, it's one of those very interesting things around how the ecosystem has evolved. And I think we mentioned this quite a few times in the conversation around the changeover from VMware, and I think the cloudification, which Andre, you pointed out, and then obviously, that was made even worse with the Broadcom acquisition. And I think one of the things that we've seen, especially those of us that's been in the industry for a while, but industry for a while but there's a lot of changes happening and it's a constant change and you you need to make sure that you keep abreast of all those changes I mean I think specifically when it comes to something like a backup tool and a disaster recovery strategy that's I guess that's absolutely critical right Andre? Yeah for sure but I guess you're right in like overall statement is the change management is very important in everyday life and sometimes obviously we we do basically anything to I don't know to I don't know to move from one place to another with our families or something like that but then when it comes to those solutions and the platforms obviously something that I'm using today it wasn't available even like one one year ago and then yet I'm using it already so yeah very important to kind of to stay afloat and to you know to to get yourself educated and to make sure that you know all the recent like best practices are met and like you know it and these days I think with like the number of tools that we're getting was specifically AI it's kind of a much easier but at the same time much more difficult I don't know Brad would you agree with me? I do and I I would add that I think more than ever it's important to you know stay up to date and keep keep your hand on the pulse a little bit of what your vendors are doing so I like that you mentioned security earlier you know we just went through and implemented all the new immutable backup stuff that Veeam offers and and I think even you called it out that you know it was work you know it took a little bit to get it done but now that it's there you know it's working so great and and we're really happy with it so I just think with all the things that are changing especially around AI like it it is harder than ever but I also think it's more important than ever to stay with your vendors and keep things up to date and kind of you know figure out what's next right like kind of what we're doing right now like what's what's coming. Yeah and I think it's an interesting point is that it's not just from a software perspective because I think having had discussions I mean one of the other integrations that OpenEVLA has is with NetApp and obviously with Everpeer and and we we know that they also started looking at the security immutable backups and not just from a you know a software stack approach but also from a storage device approach making sure that you've got all And I think it kind of touches on the point where there's certain new trends coming into the market and you need to make sure that you keep track of those trends and I both of you pointed out something very interesting that I want to just dig out a little bit deeper and that's around the advent of AI because I guess that that's the that's the joker in the pack right that's what everybody is now starting to look at I know that OpenEVLA is doing AI factories as well and I think that's the one thing where the workloads are becoming quite extensive and the way to protect that it's going to be potentially different from a way that we protected traditional workloads I guess I'll open my back question to you Andre. I mean I don't know whether it's a question to be honest. Yeah it sounds more of a statement but yeah I think it's obviously like I said it's very important to yeah to you know to just be around to not be in like in a silo and then embrace and adopt new technologies new functionality new features obviously because the things that we were doing and the ways how we were doing like our like I don't know in general things a couple of years ago they're so much changed so yeah no argument here it's I obviously I agree with you. Yeah it's one of those things where I remember when when AI was not even really a thing and now it's pretty much an everyday life and everybody uses it so it's it's it's really really interesting to see. Well I don't see any more questions so I think that we can actually close things off you. Thanks everyone for joining us and thanks both to Andre as well as to Bradley for joining me and listening to me wax on and asking questions that's not necessarily prep beforehand but it was a very good conversation so thank you all and we'll see you in the next next webinar that will be running. Thank you very much. Thanks everyone. Thank you.
