Veeam Extends Data Protection To All NAS, Enhances Instant Recovery

Veeam claims its Veeam Availability Suite v10 offers the most comprehensive, vendor-agnostic support for protecting data on any vendor's NAS systems, and said it can protect against ransomware by making AWS S3-compatible storage objects immutable.

Data protection and management software developer Veeam has added the ability to back up and protect data from nearly any NAS-based data store, claiming to overcome the performance and vendor-specific issues normally associated with protecting NAS data.

The Baar, Switzerland-based software vendor also enhanced the performance of its Veeam Availability Suite, and gave it the ability to protect Amazon Web Services S3-compatible object storage against ransomware attacks.

The new capabilities were three of about 150 new changes Veeam added with the release of Veeam Availability Suite v10, said Chief Technology Officer Danny Allan.

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Veeam Availability Suite v10 represents a huge step for Veeam and its channel, said Charlie Collins, director of sales a Secure Data Technologies, an O'Fallon, Ill.-based solution provider, MSP, and Veeam channel partner.

"Enhanced NAS backup capabilities simply protects customers more comprehensively than anything from Veeam or any competitor," Collins told CRN. "This release for our business is as important as the original release of Veeam was. The granularity of the restores shuts the door on the competitive landscape."

For Secure Data Technologies, the release of Veeam Availability Suite v10 was big enough for the entire company to celebrate with a party, Collins (in photo, with 'v10' on his back) said.

There are a lot of data protection offerings that have depth, scale, and granularity, Collins said.

"But they tend to increase the complexity and cost," he said. "We can remove complexity from customer environments by bringing them to Veeam. Our larger clients typically have two backup and recovery offerings, including products with deep granularity or tight recovery point windows. Customers might use Veeam for data protection, but for 10 or 20 or 30 virtual machines use a tighter solution. The new Veeam offering will change that dramatically."

Allan told CRN that the ability of Veeam Availability Suite v10's most significant new enhancement is the ability to backup up NAS-based data from well over 95 percent of NAS systems in the field.

The software is compatible with Windows or Linux servers and either the SMB (Server Message Block) versions 1, 2, and 3 or NFS (Network File System) versions 3 and 4.1 protocols, he said.

"Veeam believes it's important to be flexible and reliable," he said. "We can work with any SMB or NFS share, and so this applies to all NAS vendors."

Also new with Veeam Availability Suite v10 are new, enhanced instant recovery capabilities, Allan said.

This includes the ability to recover multiple virtual machines at the same time instead of one at a time, the ability to recover from any backup to a VMware environment, and new software intelligence to increase recovery speed without the need to add additional expensive hardware, he said.

While Veeam already offered a wide range of capabilities to protect against ransomware attacks, v10 adds the ability to make immediate copies of the backup to offsite targets during the actually backup process to ensure ransomware attacks do not have the time to impact the data, he said.

Veeam Availability Suite v10 also supports AWS S3 object storage immutability, Allan said.

"If data is backed up to S3-compatible storage, it can be flagged as immutable so it cannot be changed," he said. "This might increase storage capacity for the backup, but for customers who need the protection, it is important."

Among the approximately 150 new capabilities in Veeam Availability Suite v10 are a lot of support for Linux and for modern database environments and a new data integrator API, Allan said.

"This new API offers an easy way to change a backup from an insurance policy to a source of useful data," he said. "For instance, you can give the backup data to a data analytics company to get insights, or to the finance department to find useful information.”