Using vCloud Director to Drive IaaS Efficiencies for Service Providers

Service providers are constantly seeking new ways to drive operational efficiencies and remain agile, all while keeping an increasingly demanding customer base happy. Whether it’s through new processes, automation or tools that enable infrastructure management, service providers don’t just want to streamline business operations, they have to. The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) revenues to more than triple, from $12.6 billion in 2015 to $43.6 billion in 2020.

So, what should service providers be doing to prepare for optimal efficiency in a rapidly growing market?

Many service providers are turning to vCloud Director for the ease with which it enables them to offer IaaS to their customers. And, Veeam continues to build tools and technology to help service providers build data protection services, one of which is enhanced support for VMware vCloud Director in the upcoming release of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5.

When the previous v7 support was released, it was a game-changer for many service providers. They were able to protect native vCloud Director components like Organizations and vApps, as well as VMs at the underlying vSphere level. Veeam’s new release builds on the previous vCloud Director support by providing their 12,400 Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partners with intuitive tools that further streamline the protection of provisioned services with improved management efficiencies and reduced costs.

Veeam’s latest support release delivers key learnings in how backup software is further innovating the way service providers can deliver on availability needs. It also provides insight into the philosophy they must adopt to cater to the Always-On Enterprise. Here are the key learnings of what Veeam’s new support for vCloud Director offers and what that means for service providers:

Help tenants help themselves

By default, service providers are tasked with much — if not all — of their tenants’ heavy lifting, and that’s why they utilize your services. However, self-service models reduce costs for service providers by saving both time and resources spent managing multiple tenants’ availability needs. At the same time, enabling tenants with self-service drives down their RTOs and helps them meet tight SLAs. It’s a win-win situation. Veeam is enabling service providers to offer self-service backup and restore to tenants, without having to build their own portal based on RESTful API, with a new, native self-service portal based on Veeam Enterprise Manager.

Maintain control and optimize performance

The need to empower tenants does not mean service providers should not maintain control where needed. Provider-defined policies and pre-configured, custom-built backup templates allow providers to provide freedom within boundaries. Through the use of Veeam’s predefined job-setting templates, limiting scheduling control access and with the help of intelligent load balancing, service providers can ensure optimal performance of their infrastructure, while still allowing a lot of control to the tenant.

Increase confidentiality

Tenants trust that service providers are delivering the highest degree of confidentially in every aspect of operations, and any features of an IaaS platform that increases security is worth looking into. With Veeam’s latest support, confidentiality has improved using native VMware vCloud Director credentials for Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager with central control of all backup and restore operations in an intuitive web browser interface.

Ensure complete visibility

It’s important to have maximum visibility of each tenant, and the protected VMs, with the growing number of tenants. Not only that, but the ability to restore entire VMs or guest files directly back into production are capabilities that every provider needs, and one that comes with Veeam’s vCloud Director support. 

Efficiency means delivering better RTOs

Finally, maintaining IT efficiencies and agility requires a battle-tested backup and recovery solution with a proven ability to deliver RTOs of less than 15 minutes. Here’s a look into the framework of Veeam’s new vCD support:

Conclusion

Maintaining IT efficiencies and agility requires a new approach to keeping IaaS models Always-On. Simplify management and increase efficiency by empowering tenants with self-service backup and restore capabilities and enhanced security measures with new Veeam Availability Suite 9.5.

Edward Watson is Global Product Marketing Manager – Cloud for Veeam Software, a provider of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise, helping organizations meet recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data.

Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.