Hello.

There is a new weapon in the eternal battle against ever-growing and ever-longer backups: Fast Clone Support.

Although the name suggests otherwise, we are not the inventors of this technology, but Veeam.

In a nutshell, the trick works like this: within a backup, data files already present are not saved again, but only referenced. Since in a typical backup environment most of the data never changes, a large portion of the copying processes can be saved this way. This is especially true of our Immutability feature, Continuous Snapshots.

The effects are dramatic.

First, backups become up to 80% faster than without Fast Clone Support. You will benefit most when you switch directly to the Flash-based Silent Brick Plus as your primary target. Since the Forever-Incremental technology is very IO intensive when recovering, this is a good idea anyway to get back up and running as quickly as possible in case of an emergency. But also the regular Synthetic Full backups in the secondary target are completed in a fraction of the usual time.

Moreover, for the same backup strategy, depending on the instance and implementation, you need about 50% less storage space – or you can secure much more data on your existing system or make more frequent (synthetic) Full Backups. The effect is immediately visible if, for example, you turn on the “ReFS/XFS” switch in the Veeam Capacity Calculator at the top right.

In other words, your backup will be faster and cheaper.

And that for free – Fast Clone Support will be available for all Silent Brick Systems starting in August via a software update. If that’s not good news.

Please excuse the trite phrase in the title. Maybe I watch too much YouTube. But as Michael Bechtold of Bechtle Rottenburg says, “Fast Clone Support is a Game Changer for backup storage systems.”

Let’s change the game.

With safe greetings from Munich and Heerlen,

Team Comex and FAST LTA