For businesses considering a Veeam-based data protection strategy, the real question isn’t about choosing Veeam Backup as a Service (BaaS) or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) – it’s about understanding your client’s tolerance for downtime. How long can their operations pause before significant damage hits? Answering this defines their Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
This guide cuts through the fluff to help you determine your client’s needs and match them with the right backup and disaster recovery plan. Let’s dive into what really matters for making this decision.
Recovery Time Point Objective (RTPO)
All customers will have a degree of risk tolerance for their data protection needs. Certainly, in an ideal world, we never lose data at all, and can retrieve all data from data protection – But in reality, we need to accept that there will be a degree of downtime, and a degree of loss.
When proposing a solution to a customer, it’s important to factor in:
- How much data loss, measured in time from a disaster, can a customer afford before it’s considered unacceptable for their business operations.
- How long, measured in time, is considered acceptable to restore a production environment to a previous state.
This is where we generally see Recovery Time Point Objective (RTPO) come in. RTPO is a combination of the below:
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How far back we can restore to, and where is our most recent restore point that is available. For example, if we had a production server outage, do we need to go back to the night before, or can we restore the state it was in an hour prior?
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How quickly can the production environment be restored. For example, even if you had a restore point from 5 minutes ago, it’d possibly be catastrophic to take 4 days for the restoration to complete.
Which offsite Veeam solution do you go with? BaaS or DRaaS?
You may be asking yourself how this all ties in together for deciding between BaaS and DRaaS, and how Veeam handles these two solutions. The fact is, with Veeam, these are two different job types
Veeam BaaS
Veeam BaaS is best designed for recovery of data where it is acceptable to have a level of downtime while you recover the data. Veeam BaaS is limited by a few factors, such as:
- How quickly can you read the backup data?
- How quickly can you write the data back to production?
- How quickly the network can transfer the data to the end destination?
So if we have an environment that needs to write 4 TB to recover a VM, and we can write to the new host at 120 MB/s, you’d be expecting a downtime of roughly 9 hours.
So BaaS is optimal for environments where RTO isn’t critical, or when RTO can still be performed in an acceptable amount of time. Generally BaaS can go back far enough that RPO is considered acceptable.
Veeam DRaaS
Veeam DRaaS is used when you need the data readily available as soon as possible, often within minutes. Veeam DRaaS involves sending snapshots of existing VMs to a secondary hypervisor, with a network appliance to handle traffic needs.
Veeam DRaaS has one big limitation: It’s not designed for long-term RPO.
However, where DRaaS comes in strong is that your production environment can be spun up and accessible within minutes. This is critical for many organisations that may lose significant revenue per minute of downtime.
While BaaS can be considered optimal for RPO, DRaaS is not. DRaaS is your tool of choice where RTO is critical.
So which one do you choose?
Communicate with your customer. Is RPO a priority? Is RTO a priority? Or are both important?
In the event both are important, you’ll need both BaaS and DRaaS. Neither are a replacement for each other, nor does Veeam advertise it as such!
Once you work out your customer needs you can spec up the ideal solution for them.
Still need more help? Reach out to me, I’m happy to discuss your needs in greater detail.