Veeam revealed today that the next release of Veeam Availability Suite, its flagship business continuity solution, will add protection for physical servers and NAS devices to its existing support for local and cloud-based virtual machines.
The Swiss BDR vendor, whose U.S. headquarters are in Atlanta, made the announcement at its VeeamON partner and user conference, which is currently taking place in New Orleans. Veeam introduced a long list of other new and forthcoming products as well as a new API for storage partners at that show†as well.
Version 10 of Veeam Availability Suite is due to ship in the fourth quarter of 2017. Adding protection for physical servers and storage devices to that product will fill a significant gap in its capabilities, according to John Metzger, Veeam’s senior director of product marketing.
“This has been a key objection to Veeam from customers and prospects,” he says.
It also positions Veeam to grab a larger share of the BDR market by turning a solution originally designed to backup virtual machines running on VMware hypervisors, and in later editions Microsoft Hyper-V as well, into a more comprehensive platform for protecting all of an organization’s virtual, physical, and cloud-based workloads.
“Our vision for the future is simple: Provide always-on availability for any service across any cloud or infrastructure,” said Peter McKay, who was named one of Veeam’s two co-CEOs last week, during a keynote presentation today.
Other enhancements in Veeam Availability Suite v10 will include a new solution first disclosed yesterday called Veeam Continuous Data Protection that backs up workloads in near real time, enabling businesses to get tier-1, mission-critical systems like websites and point-of-sale applications up and running after a disaster or service interruption within 15 seconds or less.
Veeam will add policy-driven object storage support to the next Availability Suite release as well. The new functionality is designed to help companies lower storage expenses by automatically exporting older data from production repositories to cheaper cloud-based ones such as Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, and Microsoft Azure Blob.
Veeam executives showcased other products during today’s general session, including the new Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, which adds backup capabilities for laptops, physical servers, and cloud-based servers running Windows to the Veeam platform’s existing support for virtual Windows machines. A similar agent for Linux-based hardware shipped last December.
The new Veeam Availability for AWS solution, announced today, equips businesses to protect workloads housed in Amazon’s public cloud.
“As more and more mission-critical workloads are being put into AWS, we’re mitigating the risk of losing that data,” says Metzger.
Veeam shipped a similar solution for protecting email in Microsoft Office 365 last October, and announced the addition of multi-tenant functionality to that system yesterday. Targeted at cloud service providers that sell Office 365 licenses, that feature lets them collect extra income by offering data protection services as well.
A new “tape-as-a-service” feature for Veeam Cloud Connect Backups announced yesterday is also designed to help service providers add new revenue streams by arming them to offer tape-based data archiving services.
“There’s a lot of organizations that still have these types of tape practices,” observes Danny Allen, vice president of cloud and alliance strategy for Veeam, who noted that such practices persist in part because tapes, unlike disk and cloud-based storage systems, aren’t connected to the network and are therefore less vulnerable to ransomware and insider attacks.
Other additions to Veeam’s portfolio introduced yesterday include new integration between Veeam’s Cloud Connect Replication system and VMware’s vCloud Director management tool that lets service providers and other operators of multi-tenant environments configure and control cloud-based disaster recovery resources through the same tool they use to provision and administer other software-defined services.
Two pre-release products, Veeam Availability Console and Veeam Availability Orchestrator, reached partners this week as well. The former, which is a release candidate at present but scheduled to enter general availability in the third quarter of the year, lets service providers deploy, monitor, and manage Veeam availability services for virtual, physical, and cloud-based data through a single, centralized interface. The latter, which is now in beta testing, helps business automate complex, labor-intensive disaster recovery setup and administration processes.
“While many enterprises have DR plans, the testing, the executing, [and] the documenting of those plans is complex and cumbersome and this leads to untested, outdated DR plans that businesses have in place today,” Metzger says.
The slew of new products Veeam unwrapped today and Tuesday arrive at a time of rapid growth for the company, which reported a 33 percent year-over-year jump in overall revenue and 59 percent spike in cloud revenue in its last quarterly earnings report. More than 245,000 companies worldwide use Veeam products at present, according to McKay, and another 4,000 have been joining them on average every month for the last 6 quarters.
“Our trajectory for growth is something we and our partners are extremely proud of, and we see no end to that momentum anytime soon,” says McKay, adding that Veeam has hired over 1,000 new employees in the last 12 months to accommodate that growth, and plans to hire 800 more in the next year.
VeeamON concludes tomorrow.
