The latest addition to Veeam’s free offerings for its community is aimed mainly at Linux servers running in the cloud, but also supports physical Linux servers, and will offer partners ways to monetize it, though some may be down the road.
Doug Hazelman, Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam
LAS VEGAS – At the VeeamON event here, Veeam announced its Veeam Backup for Linux, a free standalone agent that will primarily provide backup and recovery for Linux servers running in the public cloud. It also will support physical Linux servers running on-prem, but this is a much smaller part of the Linux server market.
“We have had Linux support from Day One,” said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam’s CEO. “This is specifically for Linux servers running in the cloud or Linux servers running on prem. Customers have asked us to provide a solution for Linux workloads running in public clouds.”
Doug Hazelman, Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam, compared this new product to Veeam Endpoint Backup, which became available earlier this year, and which, like Veeam Backup for Linux, is also a free offering.
“Veeam Backup for Linux, is a free standalone agent that delivers file-level, volume-level, or server-level backup and recovery for Linux servers running in the public cloud or on premises,” he said.
While solutions do exist to back up these Linux VMs, Hazelman said that they are too complex, often requiring manual intervention, as well as too expensive. Many aren’t backed up at all as a result.
“This is a tremendous opportunity because there is a lack of simple ways to backup Linux VMs running in the cloud,” Hazelman said. “There is a lot of Linux out there that needs to be protected because Linux is widely used by enterprises as a cloud platform. This is mainly targeted at cloud workloads running Linux. But you can back up in the cloud and restore on-prem, or you can backup on-prem and restore in the cloud. You have flexible recovery options.”
Hazelman added that you can also target Veeam Backup and Replication capabilities for advanced granular recovery.
While the solution itself is free, Hazelman said that Veeam partners should have little difficulty using it to generate new revenues.
“It will create additional options for monetizing and managing those workloads,” he said.
Perhaps more significantly, it will also create a flood of new inquiries, if the experience of Veeam Endpoint Backup is any guideline.
“The free Endpoint product absolutely drove a huge number of inquiries and downloads and became a major lead generation source, said Jim Tedesco, Veeam’s Senior VP of Sales for North America.
“We create a market here by providing a free product,” he added. “We know there is a market, but we are teasing it with a free product to get the market excited and drive more sales of Veeam products. “We drive market share by touching configurations outside of the ones we typically sell to, to attract attention to our main product, and increase the size of the market we can address.”
Tedeco also noted that as Veeam has already invested the money to develop this, they could choose to add pay features that provide additional value at some point,
“We could easily turn on additional product functionality and monetize that, but not at this time,” he said.
A closed beta version of Veeam Backup for Linux will be available in the first half of 2016 on a first come, first serve basis. Hazelman said that partners who want in should sign up quickly at http://go.veeam.com/linux. General availability is also scheduled for the first half of 2016.
