Veeam Software – The Next Big Thing – Round Up

Today we experienced a very different type of announcement from Veeam Software, as an employee of Veeam Software I was able to hear about these new announcements either at SE training back in May or just last week on some final new names and features rather than just code names.

In my opinion Veeam have really started and set the pace for the availability market, the virtualized workload protection world is dominated by us as Veeam. With the release of Veeam Endpoint Free in March 2015 this was setting the tone for things to come, from that flagship single product line with a few monitoring and reporting options dependent on your existing environment. Veeam must have been assessing the market and realized there was a gap to bring out these new announcements and bring Veeam into more of a portfolio company with a number of different offerings.

I want to take some time to run through a summary of each of these new announcements, I then plan to take several of these announcements and features and give out more detail in future posts.

The first of the announcements is not actually product, nor a feature. I would suggest this being a Strategy or a Vision. Prior to this announcement Veeam had their virtualization story with either VMware or Hyper-V, the physical world was still there, diminishing but still there and very much still within the enterprise arena, namely Physical Oracle boxes where moving to a virtualized platform would cost a fortune in licensing.

In March 2015 the EndPoint FREE product was released, this was really there for personal laptops and desktops running the latest Windows Operating System, it just so happened that Windows 7 actually uses the same kernel as Windows Server 2008 R2 meaning that EndPoint FREE could also take an application consistent backup of a server running this OS or newer.

This has led to further development in this area and Veeam now with this announcement not only have a play within the Physical Windows server space but also Linux and I will summarise this a little further in the next session.

But also think Cloud Based Virtual Machines this same agent approach including EndPoint FREE gives the ability to backup those workloads whilst still keeping a trusted backup vendor and proven solution to protect an entire estate.

Let’s take a step back here, Veeam already had a very well-known and proven solution for your Private / On-Premises environment in the form of Veeam Backup & Replication. Now they have added the public cloud and physical abilities to this portfolio or platform as it is called.

Also with the version 8 announcement / release (2015). Managed Cloud providers were able to take advantage of selling a Backup as a Service for existing Veeam customers, removing that CAPEX model of kitting out a secondary site for long term retention backups, in v9 Veeam announced the option to also offer DR as a Service extending that removal of requiring that second CAPEX model for a second site purely for DR when they could buy on a Pay As You Go type model to a trusted partner or reseller.

All in all, for each of those three pillars where any modern day company is either enriched and using or dipping their toe in the water, the difference today from Veeam there is a story or a solution that can be filled for each of those scenarios.

Moving on to Public Cloud, we all know that these Cloud VMs are residing on a hypervisor of various flavours. The difficulty for Veeam here is that we do not have access to the underlining hypervisors from these public cloud providers meaning that our only option is an agent based approach. These agents from Veeam will be the same agents deployed on physical hardware as the agents deployed on a public cloud instance.

Early April 2016 this new product was announced; it was announced to offer Orchestration of Disaster Recovery for the Enterprise.

VAO will bring orchestration of data and workloads in on-premises and cloud environments; bringing functionality that simply isn’t there within this space today, the first version orchestrates for DR only.

This product will not only allow you to build out this DR plan for if there was ever the worst to happen, but it will also allow for testing of these plans in isolated or non-isolated environments, leveraging SureReplica technologies. It will also remove for what can only be described by a large number of IT professionals as the “boring laborious bit” Documentation! VAO will provide detailed run book like documentation that will be dynamically be updated should there be any modifications. A huge time saver in my opinion.

This is the artist formally known as Veeam Managed Backup Portal, you can see from the initial vision diagram where this console now fits, it basically encompasses all other virtualised, physical and public cloud management and now provides the following to the enterprise or service providers.

• Easily and efficiently manage protection of hybrid cloud, remote offices and mobile users.
• Service Providers are able deliver Veeam-powered backup and replication services to their customers.
• Enables partners and resellers to launch a new service provider business and capture new revenue streams.

I saved the biggest announcement till last in my opinion. More and more people are moving toward Office 365 and why not it has its own great advantages against an on premises solution. I don’t need to tell you these but the numbers of people moving this way has greatly increased over the last 12 months.

What does this mean? Well it means that Veeam will be able to take a backup of the end user Office 365 mailbox database, bring it back to a Veeam backup repository wherever that may reside but then be able to take advantage of the great benefits and features of the Veeam Explorer for Exchange even allowing for migration between Office 365 back to an On-Premises environment.

Veeam also has the capabilities of restoring back to Office 365 or out to a PST, from a migration point of view Veeam Explorer for Exchange has always had the capability of assisting with mailbox migration to Office 365, this makes for much more of a well-rounded story.

I have lots more to say and lots more content to share. Throughout this week I will be releasing further posts detailing more and more useful information regarding the announcement and new product releases. As always please feel free to leave me any feedback.