Day two of Veeam ON in the can, and a big day for thier core product Veeam Availability suite, with the announcement of Version 10, delivering some key new functionality. There was also some smart additions to the wider Veeam Platform family, but more on those at a later date.
Let’s start with Availability Suite V10, still very much at the core of what Veeam are delivering;
Physical Servers and NAS
While Veeam introduced the ability to backup physical servers with their free end point protection tool, V10 sees that capability more tightly integrated into the suite, this with the addition of agents for both Windows and Linux strengthens their capabilities in the wider enterprise, allowing Veeam to truly move just beyond virtual machines workloads.
NAS support is also a very welcome addition, allowing direct interaction with data housed on those enterprise storage repositories, housing TB’s of unstructured data. In a Veeam world previously the only way to protect that data would be if it resided on a Windows File Server and for many of us, that’s just not the case.
Although great additions, I don’t think I’m been overly harsh suggesting these are “table stakes”, fleshing out the suite to capture as many potential data sources as possible and really bringing them in line with most of the enterprise data protection market.
But, the announcements did more than just fill gaps, recognising both critical business challenges and embracing key technology developments in how we store our data much more effectively.
Continuous Data Protection
Some workloads in a business are a real challenge to protect, their availability is so critical to our business that they have the most stringent recovery point and time objectives, tolerating close to zero outages and data loss.
Often this is dealt with by the application design itself taking advantage of clustering and multiple copies of data across the business (think SQL Always on and Exchange DAG’s for example), but what if your application doesn’t allow that, how do you protect that equally critical asset.
CDP is the answer, limited currently to virtual machines hosted within a VMware environment (due to it exploiting specific VMware technologies) CDP provides a continuous backup of that key workload and in the event of a critical failure, not only can Veeam now make that workload quickly available again, but data loss will be only a matter of seconds, allowing us to meet the most stringent of service levels for those critical applications.
Object and Archives
My personal favourite announcement is the addition of native object storage support in V10. Object storage is becoming the de-facto standard for storing very large datasets needing long term retention, it is the basis of storage for the public hyperscale providers such as Microsoft and Amazon.
The addition of native support, alongside the addition of backup archiving capabilities, really start to introduce the possibility of a backup fabric giving On-Prem production, to backup repository, off to cloud for cheap and deep long-term retention.
Delivering that without the need for large and expensive 3rd party cloud gateway appliances, is a real plus.
The critical inclusion of S3 support also means that if you are already deploying any of the leading object storage platforms into your current infrastructure, as long as they support S3, and those leaders do, you can hook your Veeam data protection strategy straight in.
Veeam have certainly fleshed out version 10 nicely, adding some missing functionality, but also dealing with some tricky availability challenges, while embracing some of those emerging storage technologies.
And that’s just the Availability Suite, more to come on some of the wider announcements – but now, time for day 3…
Techstringy 
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