Veeam has two versions of Cloud Connect, Veeam Cloud Connect (VCC) and Veeam Cloud Connect for the Enterprise (VCC-E). So what’s the difference?
Veeam Cloud Connect
VCC is aimed at SPs and VARs who want to create a single (or set of) serviced offering’s to many independent customers. The end users add the service provider supplied details to their console with the option of allowing remote management. The offering is consumed as a service, with costs set by the service provider for any resources and licenses that are required.
When you sign up with the Service Provider they will supply you three things. A location to connect to, a username, and a password. An example configuration can be found here. The services on offer through the SP/VAR include a Backup Repository as a Service (RaaS), managed Backup as a Service (BaaS), and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
RaaS is a backup disk target that is used as an offsite target typically for a backup copy job. This differs from BaaS in that it is still controlled by the end user. BaaS offers a fully managed service where the Service Provider now connects into the clients environment and manages all backup related tasks from within the on-premises Veeam server, regardless of where the backup jobs are connecting to. The final offering from the Service Provider is a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offering. This differs from the previous two in that now a full, off-site, DR environment can be provided based on a paid service for anywhere from one server all the way through to complete copy of Production. Further protection offerings can be included by the SP to enable N+1 redundancy.
Veeam Cloud Connect – Enterprise
Veeam Cloud Connect for Enterprise is aimed at Enterprises with multiple departments and/or multiple ROBO sites where the Enterprise IT team wants to offer Service Provider like offerings. VCC-E is available through the Azure Store and has a pre-requisite of a Microsoft EA or VMware ELA. Once met the organisation is able to utilise Azure primary storage as a backup target. This would require the creation of a Veeam server in Azure with concatenated disks to provide 64TB repository underneath. VCC-E is a subscription add-on that goes on top of any existing license cost that the end user has. The other option with VCC-E is a bring-your-own storage approach to utilise as the target.
A different path
I have seen a different approach taken when looking at the hyper-cloud offerings through the use of a cloud tiering device to tier data to long term, low access storage. This will be described with a few different devices in an upcoming post around using Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) and cloud tiering devices with some demonstrations included.