Veeam has a backup and disaster recovery product for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) similar to the solutions it already offers for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure swiftly approaching release.
The new system will reach market “within a quarter,” according to Danny Allan, Veeam’s CTO and senior vice president for product strategy, who spoke with ChannelPro last week in advance of the Veeam Live user conference taking place online today.
Upon launch, Veeam Backup and Recovery for Google Cloud will provide the same features available in the vendor’s previously introduced BDR solution for Azure and most of the functionality found in its AWS protection product. That includes integration with both Google’s cloud-native management interface and the administrative tools in Veeam’s own Availability Suite, plus the ability to move backups from the cloud to on-premises storage or from Google’s data centers to another vendor’s cloud.
The system will also include expense forecasting and optimization functionality that users can employ to anticipate how much a backup and recovery strategy will cost. “It does that even before you ever do a backup,” Allan says, adding that the system’s calculations factor in compute, bandwidth, and networking charges. “It will predict what it’s going to cost you with every component, not just storage,” he notes.
Veeam’s GCP backup product will round out its support for the top three public cloud vendors, and supplement the cloud protection currently available to partners and their clients via some 35,000 smaller cloud hosters as well.
Veeam’s latest cloud BDR solution arrives amid rising adoption of multi-cloud strategies, a topic the company plans to emphasize during Veeam Live. “Modern data protection,” which refers to the steadily increased importance of protecting containerized workloads, will be another heavily discussed topic. According to Allan, citing data from analyst firm ESG, 52% of organizations use containers already, and the figure is growing rapidly.
“It’s ramping up quickly and we see this within our customer base,” he says, adding that containers will eventually become the predominant deployment mode for production workloads, eclipsing the virtual machines Veeam initially set out to protect when it opened its doors in 2006.
“I wouldn’t want people to have the thought or the understanding that virtualization will just disappear,” Allan says. “However, for modern applications, for modern infrastructures that need to scale and grow and move across clouds, for example, containers offer tremendous benefits.”
Veeam announced its $150 million purchase of Kubernetes backup and recovery vendor Kasten last week. “We believe that this is an incredibly strategic acquisition for us as the industry shifts from a virtualization-centric infrastructure to a container-centric infrastructure,” Allan says.
Drawing on an earlier partnership with Kasten, Veeam introduced a working prototype of integration between Kasten’s solution and the Veeam Availability Suite earlier this year. Allan expects to have a full-blown, Veeam-branded product in market sometime next year. When it arrives, he continues, the system will do for Kubernetes almost exactly what Veeam’s AWS, Azure, and forthcoming GCP solutions do for those environments.
“You have a standalone independent product that is optimized for that infrastructure, but it plugs into the core platform so that you have central visibility and management,” Allan says.
The third theme of presentations at Veeam Live is the importance of “immutable repositories,” a feature added to Veeam Backup for AWS earlier this year that allows users to secure backup data in AWS from ransomware by locking out changes or deletion for a pre-defined period of time. The new technology is designed to extend the kind of protection available to onsite backups, typically via hardware-based solutions, to the public cloud via software.
“Now no matter whether their data is on premises, whether they move it into the cloud, or whether they put it on tape, it’s secure and safe from ransomware,” Allan says.
Veeam will also announce the introduction of a new partner community called Veeam Legends at its conference today. The free program seeks to augment the mostly technical conversations currently held by some 70,000 registered users in Veeam’s online forums with peer-to-peer networking and best practices collaboration discussions. Members will earn points for participating in those dialogues and for earning Veeam certifications.
“People with the highest scores for certifications and collaboration and engagement in the community become the legends,” Allan explains.
The shift to work-from-home computing and accelerated embrace of cloud computing brought about by the coronavirus pandemic has sparked increased demand for Veeam solutions this year, he continues. “It means that you need to protect data out at the edge at employees’ homes, and that has represented an opportunity,” Allan says.
It has also prodded Veeam to accelerate some previously defined milestones on its product roadmap. “It’s caused us actually to deliver the backup for GCP faster than we had originally planned,” Allan notes.
In addition, the v5 release of Veeam’s popular Office 365 protection solution, which had been downloaded by 120,000 organizations with some 12 million mailboxes as of June, will include backup functionality for Microsoft Teams originally slated to join the product later. “Being able to scale this to hundreds of thousands of users became an important part of that release as well,” Allan adds.
Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v5 is currently in beta testing and will enter general availability next month.
Relative to COVID-19, according to Allan, Veeam’s acquisition by private equity investor Insight Partners at the start of the year has had comparatively little impact on the company’s roadmap.
“We’ve been accelerating things, but there’s been no changes in our strategy from where it was prior to the acquisition,” he says.
