News

Veeam Availability Suite 8 To Enable 'Always-On Business'

Rebranded Backup Management Suite simplifies accessibility to data and apps at speeds much faster than traditional backup/recovery scenarios.

• By Wendy A. Hernandez
• 06/23/2014

In a world of instant gratification, people expect instant access to everything, especially when doing business. This thinking has been termed "Always-On Business" by Veeam Software.

To enable this Always-On Business, Veeam announced Veeam Availability Suite 8, which, according to the company, is a rebranded version of its Backup Management Suite. Available Q3 2014, the solution "ensures all applications and data are accessible whenever and wherever they are needed." Along with that, the press release cites five key capabilities: high availability, data loss avoidance, verified protection, risk mitigation and complete visibility.

The company also said that Veeam Availability Suite 8 can reduce the recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) of all data and applications to less than 15 minutes. This means customers should no longer have to use legacy backup solutions for the majority of applications, where it can take several hours to a few days for recovery.

To illustrate each capability, Veeam included some statistics from a recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) paper, "Five Considerations for Increasing the Availability of the Always-on Business," which was published on the same day the company announced Availability 8.

For high-speed recovery, customers said that 96 percent of Veeam recoveries are within recovery time objective (RTO) service-level agreements (SLAs), compared to 78 percent for other solutions. With regard to data loss avoidance or, more specifically, "near-continuous data protection and streamlined disaster recovery," 83 percent of Veeam customers are more confident in their backup than they were with previous backup systems. For verified protection, which Veeam says is "guaranteed recovery of every file, application or virtual server, every time," 71 percent of Veeam customers report improved reliability of backups compared to other solutions. As for risk mitigation, which utilizes Veeam Virtual Lab to allow for "low-risk deployment of new applications with a production-like test environment," 66 percent of Veeam monitoring, reporting and capacity planning feature users find them better than other solutions. And, finally, when it comes to complete visibility, which the company explains as, "proactive monitoring and alerting of issues before they affect operations," 71 percent of customers using Veeam monitoring and reporting tools say risk awareness has improved compared to other solutions.

New features in the upcoming Veeam Availability Suite v8 include:

• NetApp Integration: Customers can create backups from NetApp SnapShot every 15 minutes or less with no impact on the production environment.
• EMC Data Domain Boost Integration: Allows for faster backup file transformation and up to 50 percent faster full backups requiring up to 99 percent less network bandwidth. Support for Fibre Channel connectivity enables LAN-free backup to Data Domain.
• Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL: Lets customers quickly restore individual databases back to the original or a new location.
• Replication Enhancements: Built-in WAN Acceleration with replication jobs, and the ability to perform replication from backup files, as opposed to the virtual infrastructure.

Pricing includes first year of support and maintenance and starts at $1,100 for Standard Edition, $1,550 for Enterprise and $2,300 for Enterprise Plus Edition and is based per CPU socket.