Veeam Software, which makes backup and replication solutions for the virtual datacenter, has announced Veeam Availability Suite, a new solution category that is designed to enable the ‘Always On Business’ by ensuring all applications and data are accessible whenever and wherever they are needed. It is scheduled to be available in Q3.

The Veeam Availability Suite is not a net-new product, but a change in the branding and positioning of the Veem Backup Management Suite, enhanced by significant improvements between the Backup Management Suite v7 and Availability Suite v8.

“This is a rebranding of Veeam Backup Management Suite,” said Doug Hazelman, Veeam’s VP of Product Strategy. “We have always had this very close to 24/7 capability, but the issue is, how do we best get out the message.”

Hazelman said the rebranding and focus on the new solution category of enabling the Always-On Business is intended to accomplish this.

“The suite is a chance for us to talk to the market at a different level,” he said. “It’s no longer, ‘this is our backup management product,’ but it’s what it means about availability – always on business, with no tolerance for downtime.”

Hazelman said that the Availability Suite v8 won’t provide the same always-up guaranteed protection the big banks get, but that it will be extremely close, at far less cost.

“The Availability Suite will cover near real-time data protection and disaster recovery at a fraction of the price the big banks would pay for theirs,” he said.  “It would be cost-prohibitive to cover everything, except for those very few customers who need that.”

While the rebranding has already taken place, Hazelman said it won’t fully take effect until version 8 is actually released.

The new version adds integration with both NetApp and EMC Data Domain Boost. The NetApp integration lets IT create backups from NetApp SnapShot every 15 minutes or less with no impact on the production environment. Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots provides free VM, guest file and application-item recovery from NetApp SnapShot, SnapMirror and SnapVault. Veeam’s partnership with EMC has led to integration with Data Domain Boost to allow over 10 times faster backup file transformation and up to 50% faster full backups, requiring up to 99% less network bandwidth.

“We have a preview going on now for these two features, the NetApp and Data Domain Boost ongoing now, and the feedback has been good,” Hazelman said.

Version 8 also adds new recovery capability for Microsoft SQL, which lets users quickly restore individual databases back to the original or a new location. This includes point-in-time recovery through transaction log backup and replay, enabling precise restore of databases to a specific moment in time, or even to specific transactions.

“We have also added enhancements to the replication engine to make it even more robust,” Hazelman said. The new version adds Built-in WAN Acceleration with replication jobs, and lets users perform replication from backup files, as opposed to the virtual infrastructure. In addition, IT administrators can leverage the new failover plans, and perform planned failovers to facilitate data center migrations with no data loss.

“We are having our first year VeeamON event in Las Vegas on October 6–9, and our goal is to have this released some time before this event in the third quarter, ideally in August or September,” Hazelman said.

This article originally appeared on eChannelLine.