Although we got a hint at some of the announcements coming out of VeeamON during partner day on Tuesday it was really the general session Wednesday morning which brought forth the details surrounding what Veeam has in store for the future. In true Veeam fashion we yet even more innovation and expansion into their flagship Veeam Availability Suite – covering your data protection needs from all things virtual, physical, and cloud. So without further ado let’s round up some of which we saw during the Wednesday keynote at VeeamON 2017.
Veeam Agent Management
It’s no surprise that as soon as Veeam released their support for protecting Windows and Linux physical workloads that customers and partners all begged for integration into VBR. Today, we are seeing just that as Veeam has wrapped a very a nice management interface around managing backups for both our virtual machines, along with our physical Windows and Linux workloads. This not only gives us the ability to manage those physical backups within VBR, but also gives us the ability to remotely discover, deploy, and configure the agents for the physical endpoints as well!
Backup and restore for file shares.
Veeam Availability Suite v10 brings with it the ability to backup and restore directly from our file shares. Basically those SMB shares can be accessed via a UNC share and files backed up and protected by Veeam. Different from Veeams traditional restore point though, Veeam Backup and Restore for file shares doesn’t necessarily store restore points, but acts almost like a versioning system instead – allowing administrators to state how many days they would like to version the files, whether or not to keep deleted files, and also specify some long term retention around the file. This is some pretty cool feature set to be added to v10 and I can’t wait to see where this goes – whether the file share functionality can somehow be mapped to the image level backup and work together to restore complete restore points as well as apply any newer file versions that may exist.
Continuous Data Protection for all
Perhaps some of the most exciting news of all is Veeams announcement to support Continuous Data Protection, allowing enterprise and organizations to drastically lower the RPO by default to a whopping 15 second restore point. Ever since Veeam hit the market their replication strategy has been to snapshot VMs in order to gain access to CBT data and replicate that across. That said we all recognize the pain points of running our infrastructure with the impact of snapshots. That’s why, with the new CDP strategy set forth by Veeam today they will utilize VMware vSphere’s Storage APIs for I/O filtering in order to intercept and capture those IO streams to our VMs and immediately replicating the data to another location. This to me is a huge improvement for an already outstanding RTPO that organizations can leverage Veeam to achieve. This is truly groundbreaking for Veeam as we can now say have 4 hours of 15 second restore points to chose from. It’s nice to see a vendor finally take advantage of the APIs set forth by VMware.
vCloud Director Integration into Cloud Connect.
Veeam service providers have been providing many customers the ability to consume both backup and replication as a service – allowing customers to essentially ship off their data to them, allowing the SP to become the DR site. That said, it’s always just been those VMs that live within just vCenter and vSphere. Today Veeam announced the support for vCloud Director organizations and units to also take advantage of the Cloud Connect offering – allowing those running vCloud Director to also consume the DR as a Service that Veeam partners have been providing, keeping their virtual datacenters and hardware plans while failing over their environments.
Veeam Availability for AWS
Yeah, you heard that right! We have seen Veeam hit the market focusing solely on virtualized workloads, slowly moving into the support of physical workloads – and now, supporting the most famous well know public cloud – Amazon AWS. Cloud always presents risk into an environment, which in turn means that we need something exactly like Veeam Availability for AWS to protect those cloud workloads and ensure our data is always recoverable and available if need be. In true Veeam fashion though, the solution will be agentless.
Ability to archive older backup files
Veeam v10 now brings with it the ability for us to essentially archive off any backup files as they age in our backup policies off to some cheaper storage. Now we all know that cloud and archive storage is a great solution for this so guess what – yeah, we know have the ability to create what is called an “Archive Storage” repository which can live on any type of native object storage, be it Amazon or even your own swift integration. This frees up your primary backup storage performance in order to manage things such as restores, etc. – while the archive storage can do what it does best – hold those large, lesser accessed backup files.
Universal Storage Integration API
For the last few VeeamON events the question of who the next storage vendor would be to integrate into Veeam is always on everyone’s mind. With the announcement of the new Universal Storage Integration APIs the next storage vendor could literally be anyone. This is basically an API set that will allow storage vendors to integrate into Veeam – basically giving Veeam the ability to control the array, creating, deleting and removing storage snapshots allowing customers to lower RTO and RPO without ever leaving the familiar Veeam Console.
This honestly just scrapes the surface on some of the announcements Veeam has in store for us this week so stay tuned as there is another keynote tomorrow where I’m sure we will hear more about VBR v10 and also, possibly some NEW product announcements. For now, it’s off to some deep dives to learn some more about some of these great features! Thanks for reading
