Datacenter Trends

Newest Veeam Availability Suite To Be Integrated with Windows Server 2016

Version 9.5 of the Veeam Availability Suite, scheduled for release later this year, will be fully integrated with the Windows Server 2016 operating system and the Hyper-V-native hypervisor used in the datacenter, the company said.

• By John K. Waters
• 07/20/2016

Version 9.5 of the Veeam Availability Suite, scheduled for release later this year, will be fully integrated with the Windows Server 2016 operating system and the Hyper-V-native hypervisor used in the datacenter, the company said. This release of Veeam's flagship data availability product is being billed as the first of its kind to provide full support for Microsoft's datacenter technologies.

"In the past few years, Veeam has always been first -- or among the first -- to add support for newly released versions [of Windows Server]," said Veeam Product Strategy Evangelist Clint Wyckoff, in a blog post. Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 will integrate deeply with new Windows Server 2016 technologies, Microsoft Hyper-V 2016, and the 2016 releases of Microsoft enterprise applications, Wyckoff said. "It has always been Veeam's goal to quickly offer full support for new releases, because many Veeam customers and partners are quite anxious to update their environments to the latest versions," he added.

In total, the Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 comes with more than 100 new features and enhancements, including support for installing Veeam Backup & Replication components on Windows Server 2016; support as a guest OS of protected VMs, including network-free communication with a guest via PowerShell Direct; Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V support, including integration with Resilient Change Tracking (RCT) for backups and restores, and Hyper-V hosts installed on Nano Server and Storage Spaces Direct (S2D); and support for the most current versions of Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, and SQL Server.

This particular integration is part of "a continuous effort to support Veeam's direct integration with one of the world's leading operating systems, hypervisor, and most widely used enterprise applications," the companies said in a statement. Chris Van Wesep, director of Microsoft's cloud platform marketing group, said the integration provides IT admins with "new options for efficient backup operations, high-speed recovery, and the business continuity they need to keep businesses protected and productive anytime, anywhere."

Veeam claims to have pioneered a new market it calls "Availability for the Always On Enterprise," which consists of companies "with little tolerance for downtime." Companies in this market demand what Veeam calls "recovery time point objectives" (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data.

In what 451 Research Analyst Henry Baltazar calls "the Always-On era," that's a sizeable market. "In our recent surveys we found that the improvement of backup and disaster recovery was the top storage objective for organizations for 2016," he said in a statement. "Customers have little tolerance for downtime, which makes data and workload resilience a key goal for any organization."

In April, Veeam also announced plans to integrate Nimble Storage's predictive flash storage platform into Availability Suite 9.5. That integration will move companies "beyond backup and into the new era of Availability," the company's said at the time.

Veeam is expected to release Availability Suite 9.5 later this year near the time of the Windows Server 2016 release.