Veeam Reaches for Larger Enterprises with Availability Wares

Having made a name for itself for its unique approach to backup and recovery by focusing on VMs rather than physical machines for small and mid-size datacenters, Veeam is gunning to move up the food chain with its new enterprise availability suite and cloud connectivity tool.

Veeam now wants to be known as the company that can ensure what is known as provider of "availability for the always-on enterprise." The company will take a key step toward that goal with the Veeam Availability Suite v9, slated for release this quarter. The new release adds an unlimited scale-out data repository and built-in replication in one solution. With its tight integration with Hyper-V and VMware, as well as storage devices of its alliance partners Cisco, EMC, HP and NetApp, the company claims it'll deliver real-time and point recovery objectives within 15 minutes.

In addition, it will offer improved support for cloud services with enhancements to its year-old Cloud Connect tool that'll make it available to clouds of all sizes ranging from small single-site locations to the largest with support coming for Microsoft Azure.

"Veeam has built a great business in the medium-sized business and SMB," CEO Ratmir Timashev said a keynote address at the company's second annual VeeamOn conference in Las Vegas, where I spent several days talking with company executives, industry analysts, customers and partners. "We want to be the de facto standard within the enterprise."

The company indeed has made inroads in taking on larger workloads but some of its claims are ambitious, said Dan Kusnetzky, principal analyst with Kusnetzky Group. "They talk about availability in the modern datacenter but they don't cover all the workloads in the datacenter," Kusnetzky said. "For example, they don't do anything with mainframes and they don't do anything with Unix systems." Nevertheless, Enterprise Strategy Group Analyst Jason Buffington said that "they're still the one to beat in virtualization." Noting the added support for tape, added snapshot integration and last year's support for physical Windows servers, Buffington said that Veeam is making inroads into supporting legacy systems.

Veeam took a further step in legacy system support by announcing Veeam Backup for Linux, a free agent that can run on any physical Linux server. It'll let administrators restore backups from on-premises servers as well as cloud instances and will work with the new v9 suite. A closed beta will kick off in the first half of next year. "They're incrementally getting rid of those last reasons to keep that legacy solution," Buffington said.

Doug Hazelman, Veeam's senior director of product strategy, made no bones that the company is looking to take on some of its larger rivals such as CommVault, IBM and Veritas (the company Symantec is spinning off that offers Backup Exec and NetBackup). "We've been having a lot of success," Hazelman said. "There's been several instances where our new license cost is less than the maintenance renewal for their existing software, and yet we have even greater capabilities."

The company also said it has 1,000 providers offering its new Cloud Connect tool and announced at the event the launch of the new  Veeam Managed Backup Portal, aimed at making it easier for additional providers to roll out cloud-based backup-as-a service offerings. See my report about the Azure-based portal on our sister site Redmond Channel Partner.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/30/2015 at 10:05 AM