Veeam has updated its Backup for AWS and Veeam Availability Orchestrator (VAO) solutions, and previewed forthcoming editions of its Backup for Microsoft Office 365 and Veeam Availability Suite offerings.
The latest manifestation of a long-term effort by the data protection vendor to provide comprehensive backup and business continuity capabilities for both on- and off-premises workloads, all four products can also help channel pros capitalize on sharply accelerating adoption of cloud solutions due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to CTO Danny Allan.
“We have seen a significant growth in the amount of data that is moving into the public cloud over the last three months,” he says.
Veeam announced the new and planned products during its 2020 VeeamON conference, which was held online this week instead of in Las Vegas last month, as originally planned.
Available now through the AWS Marketplace, version 2 of Backup for AWS allows users to replicate Amazon Elastic Block Store snapshots across multiple AWS accounts and availability zones. It also integrates with Amazon’s recently introduced changed block tracking API, which according to Allan will result in shorter AWS backup times.
“One of the things that propelled Veeam to the success that we had in the early days is we could do backup so much faster because we took advantage of changed blocks on the hypervisor with [VMware] vSphere,” he says. Backup for AWS, he continues, now provides the same feature.
The most important enhancement in the new release for channel pros though, according to Allan, is the addition of functionality for forecasting BDR-related expenses. “One of the challenging things about doing backup and data protection management in the cloud is actually knowing what things are going to cost,” he says.
Version 3 of Veeam Availability Orchestrator, which is expected to reach general availability within the next 30 days, includes snapshot replication support for NetApp’s ONTAP platform. Veeam’s backup software already offers similar functionality. “We’ve taken that same concept from backup and applied it to business continuity and disaster recovery,” Allan says. The end result for users, he adds, is reduced downtime after data loss.
“They can get the lowest possible recovery point objectives because they’re integrating at a storage level,” Allan says.
Based on VAO, a new offering called DR Pack also introduced today enables “mass market” organizations to cut the cost of deploying full-blown disaster recovery solutions by up to 80% less, Veeam says. It also spares smaller organizations the complexity often associated with DR implementations, according to Matt Kalmenson, Veeam’s vice president of Americas cloud.
“We’re giving people kind of this easy onramp,” he says.
Slated to ship in the third quarter of 2020, version 5 of Veeam’s Backup for Microsoft Office 365 will add granular recovery for Microsoft Teams data to the system’s existing Teams backup support. “When you’re dealing with a Teams environment, you often just want to recover a single conversation thread or a single video chat,” Allan notes.
The new release will also let users backup channels, settings, and tabs in addition to data, and provide enhanced search functionality for e-discovery efforts.
Downloaded by more than 120,000 organizations with over 12 million user mailboxes, Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is the fastest growing product in Veeam’s history. Version 5 arrives amid exploding use of Teams by people working from home due to coronavirus-related social distancing policies. According to Microsoft, Teams had 75 million daily active users as of April.
Veeam Availability Suite version 11, which is due late this year or early in 2021, will come with a new continuous data protection feature designed to dramatically shrink recovery point and time objectives.
“You would never lose more than a second or two of data,” Allan says. Due to the impact the new feature is likely to have on networks, however, Veeam foresees businesses using it only for their most critical workloads.
“Many customers don’t even have the network capabilities to replicate continuously between data center A and data center B,” Allan observes, “They might have a 10-gig link and they need a 100-gig link.”
Also due in the next Availbility Suite release is enhanced instant recovery functionality that can restore any backup, regardless of its source, onto Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor. The new feature will make recovery significantly easier, Allan notes, by allowing organizations to perform the process on any server, desktop, or laptop running Microsoft Windows.
“What’s the one thing that every single office in the entire world has?” Allan asks. “Something running Windows.”
Instant recovery for individual Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases is coming too, he continues, along with instant recovery for NAS systems. “If your network-attached storage system goes down, you can power it on from the backup and get access to it across the organization immediately rather than waiting for the full system to recover,” Allan says.
Version 2 of Backup for AWS follows version 1 by just six months. Version 5 of Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is scheduled to ship less than a year after version 4, and version 11 of Veeam Availability Suite could reach market less than a year after version 10 . Such rapid update timing is core to Veeam’s development culture, according to Kevin Rooney, Veeam’s vice president of Americas channel sales.
“What our partners have come to expect from Veeam as a whole is that we continuously iterate on our products,” he says.
