Podcast Learn about ThinkOn's Complete Backup Solution powered by Veeam and Lenovo
By John Dathan / 26 May 2021 / Topics: Backup & recovery
By John Dathan / 26 May 2021 / Topics: Backup & recovery
ThinkOn’s data centers are designed against all matter of threats and attacks, but data is always vulnerable without a backup. In this TechTalk, John Dathan, Insight Canada’s Senior Vice-President & General Manager, is joined by Ahsan Khan, ThinkOn’s Chief Technology Officer, to discuss how ThinkOn’s Complete Backup Solution, powered by Veeam and Lenovo, can enable you to make the most of your cloud investment, whether it be on-premises or in a hybrid cloud.
To experience this week’s episode, listen on the player above, watch the conversation below or scroll down to read a complete transcript. You can also subscribe to Insight TechTalk on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Play.
Audio transcript:
Published May 26, 2021
JOHN
Hi and welcome to Insight's Tech Talk. My name is John Dathan. I have the pleasure to lead Insight Canada and very excited about the session that we have today. We're going to be partnering with ThinkOn to bring to market a complete backup solution and my guest today is Ahsan Khan. Who is the CTO for ThinkOn, Welcome.
AHSAN
Nice to meet you. Thank you for having me, John.
JOHN
Excited to have you here. And for folks, a little bit of background on ThinkOn I've actually partnered with them since they were formed in 2013. They are a cloud service provider, they serve the needs of about 1300 Canadian clients but they've also gone international with data centers now in the US, in Australia and in England and a terrific partner of Insight's. So Ahsan I wanted to kind of just get a few things from you. And I specifically asked for you to join today so that this isn't really a marketing event but it's really explained to people what we're doing in terms of this backup solution. And we call it complete because we've got an on-premise backup. We've got backup inside of ThinkOn's cloud. We have a disaster recovery setup and there's some degree of ransomware protection. So what I really want to do is break that down and have you explain to folks what that is. So why don't we start with the on-prem portion. So what kind of storage will customers have?
AHSAN
Absolutely and you're absolutely right, John this is a complete data protection and recovery for all subscriber critical data. And the on-premise storage is dedicated, powerful, best practices, built appliances with consultation from Veeam and Lenovo to be able to provide on-premise backups. And then there's protection added on top of that like for example, RAID 6 protection also (indistinct) data to make sure that's protected. And it gives you the ability to scale horizontally those systems, to be able to add appliances and grow as the data set is growing for your business and have the ability to maintain things that you're familiar with. For example you can have the appliances in Windows format and take advantage of ReFS for space savings or with new version 11 of Veeam. With Linux you can actually have immutable storage which actually gives you the ability to lock down your on-premise backups from being able to have an occurrence of deletion. So something if happens and a rogue employee or as well as ransomware hits and tries to delete your data. It actually won't do that with the protection of version 11 on Linux. And again, it gives the appliance the ability to be catered to how the subscriber wants to set it up and how they work. But at the end of the day knowing that it's built based on best practices recommended by Veeam and Lenovo in terms of CPU, Ram and storage it gives the ability to have a complete on-premise solution that's protecting your data but have the ability to cater it to a subscriber needs.
JOHN
Yeah. Good. Yeah. And both Lenovo and Veeam have been terrific partners as we built this solution for our clients. So then a second copy of the data and I believe the the baseline configuration is somewhere around 50 terabytes. So a second copy is then put in to ThinkOn's cloud. So maybe talk a little bit about how and why that's done.
AHSAN
Absolutely. So when people think of backups right, they usually are concerned with, "Okay how do I protect my own premise?" The one thing they actually don't realize or don't look into, which a lot of the folks are looking into now, which is a 3-2-1 rule right? Having three copies of your data, two locations, one off site. So the offsite protection that we provide is the ability for a customer to control and send copies of their backups offsite to Insight and ThinkOn and they get to control the retention and what type of copies they're sending. And it gives them the peace of mind that a copy of their data, the most critical data to run their business is sitting off site. And that data's sitting off site which we'll talk about a little bit has added that value that you can get out of it. Being able to use it in DR, in a clean room or for just QA and testing if you wanted to. All of that is a fully managed service that's being offered here.
JOHN
Okay. So you said that a little quick so 3-2-1 three copies, two sites, one off site?
AHSAN
Yeah. One of it offsite. Absolutely.
JOHN
Got it, okay good.
AHSAN
Two medias, I meant there's three copies in two different medias and one of it offsite.
JOHN
Thanks for correcting that. Okay, good. So I know one of the things that we've built together in this which is really unique we're calling it sort of a disaster recovery set up. So it's not a complete disaster recovery live scenario but it is a setup. So could you talk a little bit about what that means for clients?
AHSAN
Yes, absolutely. So as part of the service, we wanted to make sure that it's a complete protection and recovery solution that we're providing through Insight and leveraging Veeam. So what that does, it gives us the ability to provide our customers a virtual data center. As you can call it a clean room and it's compute on demand. So as most people will send their copies of on-premise backup offsite, they still need to have and solve that problem because people assume that I've been able to send my copies off site I'm protected, but they don't actually think the full plan through is what happens is when I need to restore those backups. So what that clean room provides is the ability for customers to utilize Veeam's cloud replication directly into that clean room. So you can send copies of your data and your virtual machines to sit offsite with Insight and ThinkOn to be able to spin up at any point or you actually have the ability to use that clean room to have us do restores from your offsite backups into that clean room at time of disaster or to QA and that clean room is just really on demand infrastructure available that they don't have to sit there and manage or pay for it. That's available to them to utilize for any means and we have customers utilizing it for DR but a lot of them actually utilize it for QA and testing and even analytics because it's on demand and available for them to use.
JOHN
Okay. So because of your cloud capabilities all the configuration is sort of pre-established but they would only start to pay for it if there was a reason that they have to absolutely use that facility?
AHSAN
Absolutely and what they can do is they can actually go ahead and implement the networking ahead of time, they can implement their virtual or physical firewalls. And some customers even set up a secondary active directory Veeam in there so that they don't have to deal with all that at time of disaster testing. So all of those capabilities are fully there and like you added John the added value, paying for what you want at time of disaster or having a model of being able to reserve compute knowing that you don't have to fight with it with anyone else when you do need to declare disaster both capabilities are available with this clean room.
JOHN
Terrific, okay. And clean room you mentioned that a couple of times you know, ransomware, we've had so many clients impacted in the last 12 months it's incredible in the phishing attempts and everything it's really quite wild. Built into the offer is I believe it's 14 days of ransomware protection. So what is that for our clients?
AHSAN
Absolutely. That's an added feature that we've added to our service and it's a protection against ransomware for deletes that occur. So usually when ransomware occurs it sits inside the organization for awhile and it tries to learn and mimic and go out and do actions but the way it targets backups, it doesn't have the ability to manipulate the backup data because most of these backup providers are writing to their own proprietary format. What it does do is it tries to delete the data. So if you don't have access to the data you can't even try to recover it. So what we do is we provide a 14 day protection against that, of any deletions, whether they're happening through ransomware or rogue employees or even accidental deletes that happen. The last 14 days you will have the ability to recover. Now what that means is, the good part is that 14 day recovery is actually hidden from the on-premise Veeam appliance as well as the subscriber. And that gives an added value that even if you have a rogue employee, they can't get to that set of backups to delete or the ransomware can't find it because it sits behind a protected, guarded wall that's built into Veeam. And (indistinct) of DR for example, if you were to lose your backups they would open a ticket or severity case with Insight and ThinkOn and we have the ability to go and take those backups, restore them back into the same Veeam cloud connect instance or this is where the clean room comes into effect, when we actually take those backups, restore them inside the clean room for the customer and they never have to worry about if it is infected, the infection stays within the clean room. They can go in, clean it with malware or run it with forensics and then once the data is fully protected and cleaned we can then help them bring it back on premise or some of our customers continue to run in the cloud because then they actually find the value of not having to manage the infrastructure.
JOHN
Got it. Okay and maybe just last question is, so we're offering all of this, is done as a service. So it's a monthly subscription, which includes the hardware, it includes all of the things we've talked about but in describing as a managed service, could you just maybe explain the managed portion? Like what is the managed element?
AHSAN
Absolutely. So the managed element is a couple of different options that a subscriber can select through Insight and ThinkOn where they have the ability to have components of it managed where we manage the hardware and then that's all. And then we have models where we can manage the full system for you. So we can actually manage the backup jobs, give you consultation and best practices and how to set up your backup jobs, how to get them off site and how to set up your DR plan. So all three capabilities are there but it's really depending on what the subscriber wants to enable, right? If they have the skill set already in-house that they've invested the time and money into learning the Veeam product they can actually scale back some of the managed services and get what they want to do. But at the same time, the customers don't want to touch anything and have a fully managed solution. We manage the on-premise appliances and the expansion of them as well as capacity, monitoring the day-to-day jobs to make sure they complete and work with the customer for any changes of jobs Or work through any restores they need, whether they're coming from the on-premise appliance or from the offsite location.
JOHN
Perfect. Well listen Ahsan thanks for taking the time to join us today. What we were trying to accomplish was really to explain a little bit of detail. We are going to be having more lengthily, in-depth technical material available for clients but I think you've done a great, great job of describing what this solution is and what clients can expect. So thank you. Thank ThinkOn for your partnership. I'll also once again, thank both Lenovo and Veeam. We really appreciate it. Take care folks.
AHSAN
Absolutely John. Thank you for having us and thank you for giving us the opportunity to present this with you.
Senior Vice-President & General Manager, Insight Canada
In 2018, John joined Insight with more than 30 years of sales and business management experience in IT. John fosters deep partner relationships and meaningful connections with clients. He guides Insight Canada’s overall strategy to meet their needs through unique processes, tools and services provided via Insight Intelligent Technology Solutions™ in supply chain optimization, connected workforce, cloud and data centre transformation, and digital innovation.
Chief Technology Officer, ThinkOn
A performance-oriented individual, with an excellent reputation as a hard-working achiever and over 10+ years of experience in the IT/Engineering/Management industry, Ahsan oversees companywide technology solution strategy and implementation including product deliverables, releases and schedules as well as works with technical operations in architecting and ensuring that the deployment is scalable, redundant and monitored.
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