It’s been a big few weeks for Veeam software, the start of 2020 saw them purchased for $5bn by Insight Partners, a reshuffling of the board which included the stepping down of their co-founders and hot on the heels of this comes the release of V10 of their cornerstone Veeam Availability Suite.

Software updates are a fact of life, as the world changes software needs to adapt and keep up, so this article is not going to focus on the technical advances, there are already lots of excellent blogs and articles that do that (you’ll find a great list here https://www.veeam.com/blog/v10-top-new-features-vanguards.html), rather I wanted to look at what V10 means as part of Veeam’s wider strategy.

While I’m not privy to Veeam’s overall business strategy, you can see the trends that are driving their efforts to reposition Veeam the data protection company, into Veeam the data management company, with a set of solutions that move beyond their traditional core environment of virtual workload backup and are starting to provide a wider focus in areas such as workload portability, expansion into public cloud and the extension of services for larger enterprise customers.

Such capabilities are core to modern data management strategies, more and more of us desire portability of our workloads so we can move between locations both on-prem and cloud. We also need tools and ideally, one set of them, which allow us to tactically utilise cloud where we need it such as large and cheap archive and backup repositories or protecting native cloud workloads, doing this in both traditional and modern environments.

How do these new releases, alongside some parallel announcements, show how Veeam is executing on these plans? I’ve chosen three areas that I think illustrate it well.

Cloud Tier Enhancements

Cloud Tier is a great example of vendors starting to make cloud something that can be tactically and seamlessly exploited within a more “traditional” IT infrastructure, introduced in B&R V9.5U4 cloud tier provides additional capacity for backup repositories to allow for long term retention and archive to be moved from an on-prem repository to low-cost cloud-based object storage. Version 10 enhances this by allowing for data to also be copied into a cloud object repository providing a true off-site data repository.

Using cloud more tactically is crucial to the modern enterprise, the need to use public cloud providers to deliver things that are difficult in traditional on-premises environments is a core requirement for the modern data strategy.

NAS Backup

The ability to natively backup NAS storage is not something unique to the industry and is something that has been a long time coming from Veeam. However, they have delivered something that has some smart unique features and a well thought out range of both protection and recovery options. This, however, is not its true value; increasingly more and more organisations are using native NAS repositories to hold all kinds of data. The ability to then protect it is crucial to anyone building an enterprise data strategy and as mentioned earlier, it is important to a company aiming to be part of such strategies that they can protect all key workloads because if you don’t, many will just find a platform that does.

NAS backup, alongside investments in wider operating system and business application support, continue to show a determination to ensure that their products are indeed suitable for the demands of enterprise data management.

Greater Portability

Alongside the V10 releases Veeam have continued to build upon their portability capabilities and this is one of their most impressive investments, moving data and workloads around multiple locations quickly and easily is central to today’s data strategies, we need our data and workloads in the right place at the right time, this isn’t to say that all organisations need to be able to freely move workloads all of the time, but what they do need is the freedom to utilise multiple locations to deliver the best infrastructure they can to meet rapidly evolving business challenges effectively.

The ability to protect data on-prem and restore it quickly onto a public cloud platform is already a well-established Veeam capability, however, recent announcements in parallel to those of V10 are seeing the introduction of native capabilities to not only protect workloads inside of the public cloud but to be able to have that data saved into a local repository which is easily accessible and offers a capability to restore that workload into another cloud or back on-prem quickly and easily and without the need for the end-user to have to worry about complex transformation.

Not just about an update

These V10 updates are wide-ranging and some address capability gaps, but more than this they are another indication of Veeam’s continuing desire to become the data management company for the hybrid cloud. They are not fully there yet, but then nobody is, however, it is clear that Veeam is not only committed to their strategy but very capable of delivering it and this ability to execute is vital to enterprises when choosing their data platform partnerships.

You can find more about Veeam and their V10 releases here https://go.veeam.com/v10