During the final keynote of VeeamON 2017 Veeam took the stage and threw down the guantlet on a brand new Veeam product release, the Veeam Powered Network, or Veeam PN for short.
Veeam PN is a new product, not a feature added to any others, which was initially developed to solve an internal issue within Veeam. Veeam has a lot of employees and developers in remote sites all accross the world – and the pain of constantly connecting those sites together via VPN. coupled with the frustration of tunnels dropping all the time gave birth to the Veeam PN. Kind of feels a lot like how a VMware fling comes to life, first being internal only, then released to the masses, then actually built out as an application offering. Although VeeamPN can be used to establish this connectivity between any site at all, the real benefits and the initial design intentions all focus on Microsoft Azure.
Veeam PN – Disaster Recovery to Microsoft Azure
Veeam PN is deployed into your Azure environment via the Azure Marketplace. Once your cloud network have been established another virtual appliance is then deployed from veeam.com into your on-premises environments. From there it’s as simple as setting up which networks you wish to have access into Azure and importing site configuration files that are automatically generated to your remote sites – with that, you have a complete and secure site to site tunnel established. I’m not sure of the scale-ability of Veeam PN just yet, but I do know it supports having multiple sites connected into Azure for those ROBO situations. For those remote workers on the road, well they can simply connect into Veeam PN and download a configuration file that simplifies their setup of the Open VPN client to establish a client-to-site VPN.
So at this point you may be thinking “Why would Veeam develop this tech focused around networking and what does it have to do with backup or DR?” Well, let’s couple this together with a little feature Veeam has called “Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure”. By recovering our VMs and physical endpoints directly into Azure, and then easily establishing the network connectivity using Veeam PN we can now leverage true DR in the cloud in an easy to use, scale-able, and secure way. THis is the “nirvana” of recovery that we have all been looking for.
One more thing – it’s free!
There it is – the Veeam way! They released Backup and Replication with a free tier, Windows/Linux endpoint agents free, Direct Restore to Azure – free, the explorer tech – free! Let’s add one more to that list! Veeam PN is absolutely free! And even though they have talked a lot about it being leveraged for Azure, companies and organizations can essentially use this technology to connect any of their sites and clients together – absolutely free!
Details around any betas or GA haven’t been revealed yet but keep your eyes open and I’ll do my best to help spread around any opportunity for you to get your hands on the new Veeam Powered Network!
