How Veritas Velocity Accelerates Data Replica Management and Cuts Costs

Veritas Velocity is a hybrid‑cloud data replica management solution that enables on‑demand, self‑service access to production data without the storage and maintenance overhead of physical copies. It pulls a single copy from Veritas NetBackup or the source system and creates space‑efficient virtual replicas in minutes.

Key Components

Velocity Storage Server – a virtual or physical appliance residing in the customer’s data center that stores and manages all Velocity data.

Velocity Cloud Console – a multi‑tenant SaaS portal in the Veritas cloud that provides self‑service management of the storage server and its replica data.

Velocity Client – a production server or VM that runs the database application and generates Velocity replicas.

Velocity NetBackup Integration – allows NetBackup to handle data on the Velocity appliance.

Verification Lab Evaluation (ESG Lab)

ESG Lab connected to a Veritas demo environment and performed a hands‑on assessment to demonstrate Velocity’s simple deployment, configuration, and automated data‑replica workflow.

Deployment steps included downloading the OVF template from the Veritas support site, deploying it via the vSphere client (approximately ten minutes for a 300 GB thick‑provisioned VM), configuring network settings through an SSH session, and adding two disks – one for metadata and one for replica data. The full deployment process took roughly 32 minutes.

After deployment, the Velocity Cloud Portal was used to register the new storage server and to create sandbox environments. Users are assigned one of three roles – Velocity Administrator, Database Administrator, or Sandbox User – with the administrator having full access to all resources.

Workflow automation was validated by ingesting data from an Oracle database using RMAN backups and Oracle Block Change Tracking, which transfers only changed data blocks. The first replica is a full backup; subsequent replicas use incremental block changes, dramatically reducing transfer volume.

Performance benchmarks compared manual backup/restore in an Oracle RAC environment with Velocity‑enabled automation. Results showed a 2.7× speed increase for the first test environment and an 8.8× increase for the second, while manpower requirements were cut by about half.

Supported Platforms and Roadmap

During testing, Oracle was the only supported application‑aware platform, but Microsoft SQL Server (via CIFS), Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and VMware are slated for future support. ESG expects that by 2017 organizations will shift focus from pure data protection to data availability and management.