Veeam's Availability Platform Will Gain Continuous Data Protection

Veeam this week explained how it plans to fulfill its goal of extending its popular virtual machine protection platform to offer near-real-time availability of mission-critical systems running in hybrid environments. The company outlined its ambitious plans, which center around the forthcoming Veeam Data Availability Platform 10.0, at its VeeamOn gathering of 3,000 customers and partners in New Orleans.

The deliverables, set to start rolling out toward the latter part of this year, will fill some key gaps in its systems availability portfolio, such as providing continuous data protection (CDP) and protection of physical servers, cloud instances and SaaS-based data including Office 365 and Linux and Windows endpoints. The 10-year-old company that built its brand and a reputation as a leader in protecting VMs last summer signaled its intent to make its data protection offering viable for large global enterprises. At this week's conference, the company introduced the Veeam Availability Suite 10.0, and supporting software aimed at building on its footprint.

Among the deliverables Veeam outlined this week include:

• Continuous data protection of tier-1 and mission-critical applications with RPO/RCOs of 15 minutes supporting hybrid, multicloud environments hosted and SaaS environments.
• Disaster recovery in Microsoft's Azure public cloud, bringing Veeam's Direct Restore and new Protected Node (PN) to automate the DR process.
• Agentless data protection of data running in Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• An agent that can protect Windows-based physical servers and endpoints, along with applications running in Microsoft Azure, AWS and other public clouds.
• Native object storage support using Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Microsoft Azure Blob and any S3/Swift compatible storage.
• Extended Office 365 protection including OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online.
• A new Universal Storage API framework that will add IBM, Lenovo and Infididat to Veeam's list of storage partners, joining Cisco, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), NetApp and hyper-converged systems provider Nutanix.

In addition to broadening beyond its core competency of protecting VMs, the company said it is transforming itself with a new brand and new software licensing that are in line with the growing trend toward subscription-based pricing, while providing closer integration with key cloud providers. "We created a great business in the last 10 years. But now the game is changing completely because customers are moving to a multicloud world, so we have to adopt," said Ratmir Timashev, the company's cofounder, during an interview at VeeamOn. The company, whose revenue last year reached $607 million, up from $474 million in 2015, aims to take in $800 million this year and exceed $1 billion in 2018.

Timashev last year determined that to reach its lofty growth goals, it needs to move beyond protecting VMs and change its business model of offering perpetual software licenses as customers increasingly demand IT providers offer cloud-based subscription models. To do so, he brought in Peter McKay, a senior executive from VMware's client virtualization group, as co-CEO, putting him in charge of operations and growing the company. McKay, who joined VMware last July, has quickly jumped into filling some of those technology gaps and broadening its development efforts to focus on the shift to cloud-based infrastructure and application services.

"We dominate the virtualized world, but we needed to do physical and we needed to be more aggressive in the cloud space and so a lot of these announcements do just that," McKay said in an interview at VeeamOn. In order to become more aggressive in the cloud, and challenge the established data protection providers, McKay said he quickly determined that providing near-real-time recovery with CDP was a key priority. "That is huge," McKay said. "It's probably one of the most exciting announcements we have, if not the most exciting, and that changes the game in the market for us."

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/19/2017 at 1:25 PM