Dan's Take

Veeam Announces New Products

Supported environments are limited to Windows and Linux, however.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 05/18/2017

Veeam is holding its user conference, VeeamON 2017, in New Orleans this year. The name fits its focus on helping enterprises support an "Always On" computing environment. The company, however, really focuses on availability and reliability for Microsoft Windows, Linux and cloud computing environments.

The company promises to help as enterprises move to the cloud by, in their words, "Availability of services, applications and data in Multi-Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud environments."

Towards that end, the company made the following announcements on the show's opening day:

• A tech preview of Veeam Availability Suite v10 that includes Veeam CDP (Continuous Data Protection), vCloud Director integration for Veeam Cloud Connect Replication, and Tape as a Service for Veeam Cloud Connect Backups
• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 V1.5
• A release candidate for Veeam Availability Console

Veeam products get rave reviews from clients when I speak with them. I always hear about the products' ease of use and reliability. Almost every time I have a conversation with a Veeam customer, I hear at least one story, and often many, of how the company's products have saved them after a software, hardware, weather related or some other type of problem.

It appears that the newly-announced products are designed to enhance the products' capabilities and bring them ever closer to providing continuous protection. This goes beyond a backup product that requires taking a snapshot of data from time to time, to capturing all storage I/O traffic at a very low level.

The only fly in the ointment is the exclusive focus on Windows and Linux workloads, regardless of whether they execute on a physical or virtual system on-premises or in the datacenters of specific cloud computing suppliers.

ind This means that Veeam offers "always on" computing for the enterprise, if the enterprise is totally reliant upon those two OSes. If the enterprise has deployed mainframe, midrange UNIX or other single-vendor computing environments, Veeam isn't the appropriate solution to consider. Furthermore, Veeam hasn't yet announced support for environments using containers. I suspect that the company will address that need by supporting the underlying OS rather than focusing on a single encapsulated workload.

Since most major enterprises still use a broad selection of systems supporting a range of operating systems, Veeam can't offer a complete solution. They do, however, offer a solution that customers rave about for their x86-based workloads.

If asked, I'm sure that executives over at Veeam would point out that they are targeting the exciting and growing part of the enterprise datacenter, and that the other computing environments are well supported by other availability products today.

I look forward to learning more about the products as the details are announced. I'm also looking forward to speaking directly with Veeam and partner executives over the next few days.