Veeam Goes All-In On Cloud, Mobility With Big Software Enhancements

Data protection and data management software developer Veeam on Tuesday unveiled new versions of its flagship software offerings aimed at helping solution providers improve their client's multi-cloud storage infrastructures.

Veeam introduced update 4 of its Veeam Availability Suite 9.5, a significant enhancement with improved cloud tiering and mobility, cloud replication, and GDPR compliance and malware prevention.

The Baar, Switzerland-based company also integrated the AWS data protection from its January, 2018 acquisition of N2WS, enhanced its licensing programs, and introduced new capabilities aimed at cloud service providers.

[Related: Veeam Gets Massive $500 Million Funding, Sets Sights On R&D, Acquisitions For Future Growth]

The new enhancements are aimed at helping Veeam become the industry leader in cloud data retention, cloud mobility, and cloud security and compliance, said Danny Allan, vice president of product strategy for the company.

"We're launching a number of different products," Allan told CRN. "But the main theme here is, we're leading in cloud data management in a multi-cloud market."

The new update 4 of the Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 is the most significant of the changes, with an aim to provide a simple way for customers to leverage the cloud as part of their IT strategies, Allan said.

It includes an enhancement to its scale-out backup repository, which allows easy addition of more on-premises, high-performance capacity. That enhancement allows backups to tier to the cloud based on capacity or time preferences.

For instance, Allan said, a customer can automatically send data to Amazon Web Services, Google, or any cloud after a set time of, say, seven or 14 days, to take advantage of limitless cloud capacity.

"It takes customers' block or file storage, and ties it to object storage either on-prem or in a public cloud," he said. "Most people will use the public cloud. We provide this at no capacity charge above what the customer pays its cloud services provider."

What's unique about this is the ability to power data up into a virtual machine and migrate it back to the customer's premises as a live data stream in case of a loss of data, Allan said.

"We're doing it with object storage, live streaming from the public cloud to on-prem," he said. "We could do that before with other data. But to stream back from object storage is completely unique."

Customers can also recover lost data onto a cloud, Allan said. "No one else can do both," he said.

On the cloud mobility side, Veeam Availability Suite is now able to recover data to work directly on AWS and Azure Stack clouds, in addition to the Microsoft Azure cloud, Allan said.

"This is all about mobility, and not just disaster recovery," he said. "Think devops, or providing copies of data to the security team for their devops. This provides flexibility to businesses to create copies."

Veeam also introduced Veeam DataLabs to provide customers with increased security and data governance options, Allan said.

For customers storing data related to European Union citizens, Veeam DataLabs can add script specifically for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) that ensures that when data is recovered, data for citizens who exercised their right to be forgotten is not accidentally recovered, he said.

It also does security analysis on virtual machines before they are recovered in order to prevent ransomware from being restored accidentally, he said. Customers can choose to either not recover the virtual machines impacted by ransomware, or restore them without network connectivity so they can be scrubbed, he said.

Veeam is also building machine learning into Veeam Availability 9.5 as a way to proactively look for hardware or software issues and give customers the option of automatically remediating such issues or deciding whether to remediate on a case-by-case basis, he said.

Also new are enhancements to Veeam Cloud Connect Replication that let service providers who work with VMware's vCloud Director to leverage their existing networking, infrastructure, and self-service management investments for disaster recovery as a service offerings.

The second major enhancement from Veeam is Veeam Availability for AWS, which now is integrated with the N2WS cloud-native backup and recovery capabilities, Allan said.

As part of this, Veeam now brings object-based storage that the Veeam Availability platform can leverage in the cloud or on-premises, he said.

"The default is to store such data in Amazon S3," he said. "We allow this to be done much cheaper than if customers use Amazon EBS [Elastic Block Store]. From on premises, customers can do file-level or virtual machine-level recovery, even of data in the cloud."

Veeam is also expanding its Veeam Availability Console for service providers needing multi-tenancy repositories, Allan said.

Veeam Availability Console v3 now provides an additional storage tier that allows large cloud service providers to provide access to their managed service providers, he said.

"This new tier offers the right level of access to channel partners," he said. "And it offers scale-out management for large-scale deployments."

Finally, Veeam is introducing a new subscription package that provides complete portability of licenses for any cloud and any workloads, Allan said.

"This allows portability for on-prem, private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid clouds," he said. "We're giving customers licensing portability for any workloads and to help them avoid lock-in to any particular infrastructure. There's no need to buy licenses for three years out to make sure they can easily move data."

Update 4 of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 is a great offering, said Matt Chesterton, CEO of OffsiteDataSync, a Rochester, N.Y.-based solution provider and long-time Veeam channel partner who has been testing the software for the past four or five months.

Chesterton told CRN that he is most excited about the new S3 compatibility of the software that allows object data to be moved to longer-term retention points given that object data is typically not hot data.

The new Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 also lets customers boot virtual machines with object storage, which may not be able to be run direct but which can be quickly moved into production once booted, Chesterton said.

"This is important for cloud providers like us," he said. "We deploy in six locations globally. Customers can take a backup from on-premises and move it off-site, boot it up, see that it works, then move it back. It's a great feature for data that has gone to disk to die. Now customers can do more with that data."

Chesterton said his most favorite new capability is the integration with VMware vCloud Director.

"Veeam is allowing replication jobs to move to vCloud Director," he said. "This allows customers to configure their networks as needed. When they replicate virtual machines, they want those VMs to be visible and see their situations. Now they can log into vCloud Director and see hundreds of VMs ready to be turned on. Customers will get much more visibility into their replication environments."