At VeeamON, Veeam announced several significant new innovations in their flagship product, which will be released later this year.

NEW ORLEANS – The second day of the VeeamON event here – and the first with customers in attendance — saw Veeam make a host of major new product announcements. The technical preview of their flagship Veeam Availability Suite v 10 saw several significant new announcements. In the wake of the WannaCry ransomware attack however, the most interesting may have been Veeam CDP, a new Continuous Data Protection solution designed to overcome the limitations of snapshots and lower recovery windows from minutes to seconds.

“Veeam enables our customers to not only survive, but to drive digital transformation,” said Peter McKay, Veeam’s co-CEO and President. “Data today is to this century what oil was in the last century. It’s the driver of growth and change.” IDC projections that $2.1 trillion will be spent in 2019 on managing that data.”

Being always on and instantly available has now become critical for companies of all sizes,  McKay said.

“Digital transformation is now the top prioirity of CEOs,” he stated.

So where does Veeam fit in?

“We provide always on-availability across any infrastructure, for any service, across any cloud,” McKay said, “As companies strive to deliver a seamless, rich digital experience, Veeam is here to help. Our vision of seamless data availability is resonating in the market.”

Over the last several years, Veeam has been steadfastly  moving beyond its original base in virtualized system, expanding into physical environments, and especially, into the cloud.

“We are expanding beyond virtualized workloads, to on-prem and to cloud, providing that wider platform, and greater ecosystem to protect any workloads, across different media types, anywhere,” said John Metzger, Veeam’s VP of Product Marketing.

“This suite is a fundamentally different and new kind of solution,” he said. “The non-stop business continuity means 2.5x fewer failures. The Digital Transformation Agility comes from our software-defined cloud-agnostic platform. Third is analytics invisibility. Veeam analytics aren’t insurance. Enterprises can now monitor and act on this data.”

Veeam is emphasizing that Version 10 makes quantum leaps forward.

“Veeam v 10 is a major extension of our platform,” McKay said. “It is a dramatic expansion with depth and breadth, for any service across any cloud. Its’ strong cloud features will change the way you think of Veeam in the market in the cloud space.”

Metzger said that Version 10 drives that business continuity and agility to unprecedented new levels. Veeam CDP is critical here. It leverages VMware vSphere API for IO Filtering to allow setting policies to drive SLAs down to seconds using continuous replication to the cloud.

“Veeam CDP delivers that continuous data protection for end users,” he said. “Customers get CDP in seconds, 15 seconds or lower. It’s a key initiative for us, which fills a major need in the market.”

“This is a first in the industry,” said Danny Allan, Veeam’s VP of Cloud and Alliance Strategy. “Recovery points have been 15 minutes apart with snapshots, something that is no longer acceptable with modern ransomware. Using continuous replication, we can reduce recovery points from minutes down to seconds.” Snapshots are not used in this process at all.

In December, Veeam introduced Veeam Agent for Linux. Now as part of this release they are reacting to one of their most requested enhancements, announcing Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, to provide availability for Windows-based physical servers and endpoints, as well as applications running in Microsoft Azure, AWS and other public clouds. The centralized management of virtual agents is now all in one console.

“We made this available last week as a soft launch,” Metzger said. “Its ability to protect physical servers removes what has always been an objection to Veeam. It protects those workloads that cannot be virtualized, as well as those which sit in the cloud,”

New native object storage support is another significant addition, which provides IT with the flexibility to move archives – principally to less expensive forms of storage.

“We are really excited about this announcement,” Metzger said. “It helps customers move archives from primary backup to less expensive storage, and is automated and very simple to set up and use.”

Another new feature to improve agility in Version 10 is the extension of their universal storage integration APIs with key storage OEMS. New storage APIs have been added for Lenovo, IBM and INFINIDAT, who have joined Veeam’s storage partner ecosystem.

“While many enterprises have DR plans, the documenting of those plans is complex and customers,” Metzger said. The Veeam Availability Orchestrator is designed to address this. It was announced last year, but now the most recent beta has been announced.

Metzger also highlighted upcoming new integrations with vendor partner solutions, specifically VMware vRealize, DataGravity and Starwind Software. The Veeam content pack for VMware vRealize Log Insight is a powerful analytics and monitoring tool for the Veeam Availability Suite environment. The Data Gravity integration enhances their fully federated search and analytics capabilities with total data visibility, security and enhanced availability. The StarWind Cloud VTL for AWS integration offers cost-effective and scalable tape replacement with Amazon S3 and Glacier object storage, helping businesses to meet regulatory requirements for data retention with no changes to the established tape-centric data archival processes.

Finally, Veeam announced Veeam Availability for AWS, which is delivered through a Veeam – N2WS strategic partnership. It is the industry’s first cloud-native, agentless backup and Availability solution that protects and recovers AWS applications and data in a Multi-Cloud or Hybrid Cloud environment.

“Veeam Availability for AWS is the first agentless availability solution for AWS, which mitigates the risk of losing that data,” Metzger said.