Dan's Take

Veeam Announces Backup for Linux

The standalone product will be available in the first half of 2016.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 10/28/2015

At its show this week, Veeam unveiled Veeam Backup for Linux, a free, standalone agent that delivers backup and recovery for Linux servers. In the company's words, it's targeting Linux servers "running in the public cloud, as well as for a few remaining physical Linux servers running on premises." Here's how Veeam describes it:

• Backup anywhere: Back up Linux instances running in the cloud or on premises.
• Flexible recovery: Perform on-premises restores from backups of individual cloud instances, or cloud restores of on-premises backups.
• Integration with Veeam Backup & Replication v9: Take full advantage of Veeam backup repositories as target locations; leverage existing Veeam Backup & Replication capabilities for granular recovery.

The company is planning to make a closed beta test version of the product available in the first half of 2016, with a general release after that.

Veeam has long focused its efforts on VMware and Microsoft virtualization tools, to the exclusion of other computing environments. This announcement makes it clear that the company understands that Linux has become an important part of enterprise IT infrastructure, especially in Web and cloud-based workloads. I disagree, though, with Veeam's stance that Linux is largely found in the cloud, and only occasionally in enterprise datacenters.

Dan's Take: How Free Is Free?
The tactic of calling the client software free interesting. Since this software is designed to work only within the Veeam computing environment, and there certainly are fees associated with the company's products and service offerings, real life usage of the Linux client will involve costs. It's a bit like Gillette's approach of offering a free handle that will only work with Gillette's blades. Is the handle really free, or is the real cost of the handle buried in the cost of the blades?

Overall, however, I think this is a good move by Veeam, helping it make further inroads into enterprise computing environments.