Veeam Software has been busy at its VeeamON user conference in New Orleans this week. During the event, the company talked about how it supports the "always on enterprise" and how it is helping enterprises support the transition to supporting the "digital life."
The company's new Veeam Availability Suite v10 is designed to, in the company's words, "provide non-stop business continuity, digital transformation agility and analytics and visibility."
Veeam Availability Suite v10
Here's what the company has to say about this new version of its software:
This platform protects:
- Physical servers and Network Attached Storage (NAS).
- Tier-1 applications and mission-critical workloads with NEW Veeam CDP (continuous data protection), bringing recovery SLAs of seconds using continuous replication to the private or managed cloud.
- Native object storage support, freeing up costly primary backup storage with policy-driven automated data management to reduce long-term retention and compliance costs. This includes broad cloud object storage support with Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Microsoft Azure Blob and any S3/Swift compatible storage.
The company goes on to describe what's new:
- Veeam Availability for AWS: The industry’s first cloud-native, agentless backup and availability solution designed to protect and recover AWS applications and data, helping enterprises reliably move to and manage a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment.
- Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows: Previously announced and being made generally available today, this solution extends Veeam “Always-On Cloud” Availability Platform to public cloud and physical servers.
- Extended Veeam "Always-On Cloud" Availability Platform: The platform delivers new universal storage API framework, adding IBM, Lenovo and Infinidat to Veeam’s ever-growing ecosystem of strategic alliance partners, which includes HPE, Cisco, NetApp, Dell EMC, Nimble and Exagrid.
Snapshot analysis—Availability Suite v10 is good, but not complete, solution
It is clear that Veeam is tightly focused on data availability and helping its customers survive software, hardware and even power failures in certain areas.
Veeam products get rave reviews from clients I've talked with. They always tell me about Veeam's focus on ease of use and reliability. Almost every time I have a conversation with a Veeam customer, I hear at least one story, and often many stories, about how the company's products have "saved" them after a software, hardware, weather-related or other type of problem.
Availability Suite v10 appears to have been designed to enhance the capabilities of the suite and bring its capabilities ever closer to providing continuous protection—which goes beyond a backup product that requires taking a snapshot of data from time to time to capturing all storage I/O traffic at a very low level.
Although the company makes broad statements about supporting the "always on enterprise," this is not entirely true. What the company really does is focus on availability for Windows and Linux workloads regardless of whether they execute on a physical or virtual system on-premise or in the data centers of specific cloud computing suppliers. That means the company offers "always on" computing for the enterprise—if the enterprise is totally reliant upon those two operating systems.
If the enterprise has deployed mainframe, midrange Unix or other single-vendor computing environments, Veeam can be part of a total solution, but it can't be the only product utilized. Furthermore, Veeam hasn't yet announced support for environments using operating system virtualization and partitioning, aka containers.
Since most major enterprises still use a broad selection of systems supporting a range of operating systems, Veeam can't offer a complete solution. They do, however, offer a solution that customers rave about for their X86-based workloads.
If asked, I'm sure executives at Veeam would point out that they are targeting the exciting and growing part of the enterprise data center and that the other computing environments are well supported by other availability products today. One executive mentioned the company is, in hockey terms, trying to be where the puck is going, not where it has been.
Veeam executives would also point out that they provide a platform and are working with partners to support their computing environments, storage systems and applications rather than trying to do everything for everyone.
Veeam is worth knowing about for the enterprise's industry.