Veeam Goes All In On Cloud With New Veeam Backup & Replication Version

‘Version 11a of the Veeam platform provides consolidation of management across all the different solutions that Veeam is able to protect. ... With 11a, you now get a consolidated view across the clouds,’ says Danny Allan, Veeam’s CTO and senior vice president of product strategy.

Data protection and data management software developer Veeam Tuesday unveiled multiple new cloud-focused capabilities in its flagship Veeam Backup & Replication version 11, along with several new cloud-native data management updates.

The changes represent a big advancement in Veeam’s ability to help solution providers better assist customers in managing their data, said Danny Allan, CTO and senior vice president of product strategy for the Columbus, Ohio-based company.

“Version 11a of the Veeam platform provides consolidation of management across all the different solutions that Veeam is able to protect,” Allan told CRN. “Veeam also released updates to its Veeam Backup for AWS, Veeam Backup for Azure and Veeam Backup for GCP. With 11a, you now get a consolidated view across the clouds.”

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Veeam Backup & Replication also now supports the lowest-cost storage within each cloud, Allan said.

“Now customers can take advantage of AWS Glacier, Azure Archive and Google Cloud Storage Coldline,” he said.

Also new with Veeam Backup & Replication is cloud-native data protection support for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Azure SQL databases and AWS Key Management Service (KMS), Allan said.

Veeam Backup & Replication 11 is an important offering from Veeam, particularly for customers looking for cloud-native data protection, said Chris Satterly, vice president of sales for the mid-Atlantic region at Comport Technology Solutions, a Ramsey, N.J.-based solution provider and Veeam channel partner.

The company’s new ability to natively recover data to Nutanix AHV virtualized environments is an especially significant capability for Comport, Satterly told CRN.

“Nutanix is a growing partner for Comport,” he said. ”We’re out there evangelizing private cloud and hybrid cloud. Now we can recover to Nutanix AHV, which is picking up steam in the battle for hypervisor relevance.”

Also new from Veeam is the first integration of Veeam Backup & Replication 11 with the Kasten Kubernetes service, Allan said. Veeam late last year acquired Kasten, but had kept data protection of Kubernetes via Kasten as a stand-alone offering, he said. “Now we‘re bringing it into 11a,” he said.

Veeam also introduced backup for Kubernetes in Red Hat Virtual environments, matching its similar offering for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV environments, Allan said.

Containerization is becoming increasingly common in large accounts, Satterly said.

“We are more on the cusp of this, but it is something we’ll be doing,” he said. ”Containerization is becoming especially important in large enterprise DevOps accounts.”

The company is also adding new automation protection for IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris assets to go with the Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems it protected before, Allan said.

“Large enterprises can still be found with pockets of AIX and Solaris,” he said. “We could back up those environments before, but now they are consolidated into Veeam 11a.”

That consolidation is most welcome, Satterly said.

“That leads to single-pane-of-glass management across multi-cloud environments,” he said. “Management is a mess out there. There are a lot of challenges. This is a critical move for Veeam to remain relevant.”

For channel partners, Veeam introduced Veeam Service Provider Console version 6. Allan said the new VSPC adds better centralized management along with integration with Veeam Pulse to simplify customer and license management.

“The VSPC is free of charge for MSPs looking to manage multitenant environments and manage their customer base,” he said.