VeeamON 2019 – Veeam Achieves $1B Mark, Focuses on the Cloud
Veeam Software’s annual user and partner event VeeamON 2019 was held on May 20-22, in Miami Beach, FL. Attended by over 2000 customers and channel partners, VeeamON 2019 featured new releases, updates and testimonials by customers such as United Healthcare (#6 on Fortune 500), which has been using Veeam since v4, when it was called “Vee Am”.
This year at VeeamON founder Ratmir Timashev shared the company’s achievements over the past decade. Veeam announced that it has reached $1B in revenue (12-month trailing), a goal he set in 2013, building a base of 350K customers, adding 50,000 customers each year. He referred to this as “Act 1”, providing “data protection for the modern data center”. Veeam Backup and Replication (VBAR) has become the dominant solution for virtualized environments that has grown into a comprehensive data protection and management solution for physical servers, with agents for a broad spectrum of applications and platforms. Now it’s time for Act 2, according to Timashev, which means a full focus on the Cloud.
Act 2
While the Veeam Availability suite (VBAR + Veeam ONE management platform) also added protection for data stored in the cloud, the company’s new vision is to be the “most trusted provider of backup solutions that deliver cloud data management”, emphasizing three themes, simple, flexible and reliable. This means upgrading Veeam’s traditional data center backup and DR solution to include protection for cloud-native applications, the ability to move data between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud (or between clouds) and to use the cloud as a repository for backup and DR processes. It also means integrations with the large cloud providers such as AWS, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
What’s New
Veeam Availability Suite v9.5 U4 was released earlier this year with a number of upgrades for cloud-based features, including:
Veeam Cloud Tier uses the automated tiering feature of Scale-out Backup Repository (SOBR) plus native integrations with Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, IBM Cloud Storage, S3-compatible service providers or on-prem object storage solutions, to move older backup files off to an object storage capacity tier locally or in the public cloud.
Veeam Cloud Mobility enables VMs stored in any Cloud Tier to be moved/restored to AWS, Azure or Azure Stack for business continuity or cost reasons.
Veeam and VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS enables data protection to and from AWS and an on-prem data center. Specifically, you can backup VMC on AWS to a Veeam repository in the Amazon cloud or on-premises. You can also protect on-premises VMs by replicating to VMC on AWS.
Veeam Availability Orchestrator v2
Traditional DR involved storing copies of critical VMs and keeping them available in case of primary infrastructure failure. Veeam Availability Orchestrator (VAO) v2 provides simplified recovery of production VMs directly from backups as well as replicas. This eliminates the need to create dedicated DR copies or maintain a recovery infrastructure 24/7. VAO v2 verifies recoverability and compliance of VMs and applications and enables the use of that data for DevOps, testing and analytics.
With Veeam
Veeam detailed a new program, “with Veeam”, to develop integrated solutions with infrastructure OEMs. At VeeamON, the company announced partnerships with Nutanix HCI and Exagrid scale-out storage.
Nutanix Mine with Veeam is a dedicated secondary storage solution that will be sold by Nutanix. This purpose-built solution is comprised of a 4-node NX cluster with Nutanix AOS and AHV, Veeam Backup and Replication and Windows Storage Server 2016. The Nutanix Mine with Veeam solution can back up any workload that Veeam can, and provides tiering to object storage, cloud storage or tape. Existing Veeam licenses can be deployed on Nutanix Mine, which is integrated into the Prism operating environment and jointly supported by Nutanix and Veeam. Nutanix Mine with Veeam will be released in the second half of 2019.
Exagrid Backup with Veeam is scalable backup solution that runs Veeam Data Movers on the Exagrid appliance, leveraging the Veeam Scale-out Backup Repository. The single-SKU package is designed for small to medium-sized business and comes in three models with starting capacity points of 13TB, 21TB and 32TB, scaling to 90TB.
What’s Coming
Some features from Veeam Availability Suite v10 were highlighted by Sr. VP for Product Management, Anton Gostev, including the ability to immediately move a copy via Cloud Tier to an object tier and new support for NAS backup, both SMB and NFS. Probably the most important new feature will be an API which will open up other services, such as third party analytics. Availability Suite v10 is projected to be released before the end of 2019.
Evaluator Group Comments
Veeam has largely created the market for virtual machine backup over the past decade, building an impressive installed base through a transaction-based sales and marketing effort. Their target has historically been small and mid-sized companies as they converted from physical to virtual servers. As they have matured, Veeam has added integrations with the major infrastructure vendors and written agents for backing up applications non-disruptively. This has opened up their entry into larger enterprise market, though Veeam’s core is still companies in the SMB to medium enterprise.
The Nutanix Mine with Veeam package replaces traditional infrastructure for data protection, providing the same advantages that HCI did for primary compute and storage. But this product also gets Veeam into the secondary storage discussion, and gives both firms an alternative to the Cohesity and Rubrik offerings.
Veeam is focused on being a Cloud Data Management company. To that end, Veeam’s cloud features – backup from on-premises, tiering to S3 and recovery from cloud-based backups – are the right direction for a company in the mainstream data protection market. Strategically, their API will open the door to collaboration with other firms to develop the functionality for managing data across clouds and on / off premises. This should include compliance, analytics and other services we expect enterprises will require as their multi-cloud environments mature.
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