Backup and cloud storage company Backblaze, is giving all Veeam users access to simple, reliable, affordable data storage that allows for a vastly expanded quantity of restore points.
For any company running Veeam, on-prem storage can be a huge budget and infrastructure stressor, and up to now, the only solution was to buy more hardware, pay for a higher tier of service or buy expensive cloud storage. With Tiger Bridge + Backblaze B2 Cloud, Veeam users can tier restore points to the cloud, cutting out the financial strain and logistics of sizing their on-prem storage. The service not only saves money, it allows users to pull down a subset of files from further back in time than their response time objective (RTO) – giving them complete control to tier to the cloud without a license upgrade, or having to pay Amazon S3 rates (with S3 being ~4x the cost of the B2 solution).
The Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage partnership with Tiger Bridge allows you to backup your VMs in the cloud and easily restore files as far back as you’d like to go, for about one-third the price of using S3. This all occurs on a single pane of glass with no interruptions to your workflow—all backup copy jobs and restores are controlled directly from your Veeam Backup and Replication Console.
Tiger Bridge is a software-only solution that expands Windows NTFS file system capabilities to include tiering to cloud, other storage, or tape. Once the files are tiered, they are replaced with zero-byte stub files in the NTFS file system. These stub files are placeholders that allow users and applications to work normally, as if the data exists in its original location. Simply opening or calling for the file triggers a restore. In this way, it is possible to have access to petabytes of data while using a modest size local volume.
As the most affordable and scalable public cloud storage platform available—with a robust REST API that is being consumed by 100’s of integrations—Backblaze B2 is the perfect tiering solution for Tiger Bridge customers, allowing for infinite copies of their backups in the cloud.
The key thing to note is that, with this solution, you do not have to change your backup job. Instead, you can make a copy of the job and have it executed once the existing backup completes. Excellent news for anyone who needs for their backup process to be invisible to end-users or for teams that need to create separate retention policies that allow for VM backup storage for any periods of time.
Deploying a proof of concept for this solution takes about 30 minutes:
● Spin up a new VM and install Tiger Bridge, configure it to use your B2 bucket
● Create a repository that Veeam can back up to. Add the newly created Tiger Bridge repository as a backup location within Veeam.
● Create a backup copy job for each of your backup jobs.
After each backup job is completed, the backup copy job copies the backup to the Tiger Bridge repository. As soon as that happens, Tiger Bridge will upload these files to B2 and replace the files on disk with the zero-byte stub files. When you need to restore a file, use the Veeam Backup and Replication console’s restore feature. Tiger Bridge will automatically bring back the files you need in a transparent way. You won’t even know the backups being restored are from B2 via Tiger Bridge!
While this solution will have your entire VM backed up in the cloud, you don’t need to download your entire VM to find a file. Using Veeam and Tiger Bridge partial restore, you can search your backed-up copies for the file you want and just download that file. If the VM is 100GB and the file you want is 10MB, you only pay to download the 10MB.
Here is a price comparison:
| Solution | $ / TB / Month | Download Price per GB |
| B2 + Tiger Bridge* | $7 | $0.01 |
| Amazon S3** | $21 | $0.09 |
Certainly, the amount of storage many companies have to deal with is growing rapidly. IoT devices are throwing off tons of data and it needs archiving and crunching for big data and analytics applications. Since budgets are not unlimited, having lower-cost options is a definite plus.
