The 5 A’s of Veeam

This post was meant to be released a few weeks back but I paused it as I was attending an Avnet Converged Infrastructure event in London, Veeam had been given a 5-minute pitch as well as a delegate panel discussion around Converged Infrastructures. There were several vendors at the event, the likes of Cisco, NetApp, HPe and many others as well as some fringe players when it comes to Converged or HyperConverged infrastructure.

Anyhow the reason for the delay in publishing this post was simply because I was always planning on using these “5 A’s of Veeam” for my 5-minute slot at the event. I was asked while at an event last year to describe Veeam in 2 minutes, what do they do? What do they do very well? And what problem do they fix? This got me thinking about a few things around what it is Veeam is but also what Veeam is perceived to be within the Industry.

85% of the audience at this event had heard of Veeam. Great stuff. However only 50% knew what Veeam does…. Not so good in my opinion. Another misconception is that Veeam is only any good in the SMB market and is not for Enterprise, this has changed dramatically over the past few years and some of the points below will allude to this.

The first A and the most important from the Veeam messaging is around “Availability” It’s not just about Backup & Replication but the “Always-On” enterprise, With Veeam ONE and Management Pack. Veeam have the ability to not only protect modern infrastructure workloads with Backup & Replication but also monitor and report on those environments giving you complete visibility of the whole infrastructure.

Veeam is all about the software, there is no hardware appliance, we truly don’t mind what vendor or protocol you want to use, yes we do offer an enhanced integration with some vendors, however the choice is truly yours.

The strongest message here is that from a storage point of view both front end production and also backup target storage. Veeam simply doesn’t mind what vendor or protocol this storage is using.

The strongest feature that Veeam offers is the ability to protect virtualised workloads without deploying any agents, from an administration point of view this is priceless. No more managing and updating these agents according to the virtual machine OS or application.

One thing that often surprises people is the ability that Veeam can deliver granular recovery for applications. It’s not just recovery at a VM level, with the Veeam explorers we can offer individual item recovery for a range of key business applications. Don’t worry if your favourite application isn’t there, via the U-AIR feature, we can create sandbox environments from the backup storage, allowing you to delve into your application and grab what you need.

My final A is that of Architecture, one of the biggest focuses from Veeam over the past few versions has been to truly achieve a scalable architecture with all Veeam components. Being able to run these components on either a physical or virtual platform and also the ability to split out and deploy as many components as required or self-contain them on one machine depending on the size of the environment.

As always if you would like further information then contact me on twitter @MichaelCade1 you will also find more information of course at www.veeam.com any feedback is also welcome.