The 9.5.3 release contains some major elements which were scheduled to be part of Veeam 10, but which were pushed out now since they are ready to go.

Today, Veeam is announcing the availability of what the vendor is calling the biggest release in their history. It is not, however, Veeam 10. That product, which was previewed back in the spring at the company’s VeeamON event, is now scheduled for next year. This is their 9.5 release, Update 3. It does, however, contain some elements originally scheduled to part of Veeam 10, which have been moved forward, since they are ready now.

The highlight of 9.5.3 is its ability to offer central management of all clouds and all workloads – virtual, physical or cloud – from a single pane of glass. Because Veeam started as a purely virtual product, partners used other solutions for physical and cloud environments. While Veeam had expanded previously into these other areas, the delivery of a seamless management capability for all three will allow partners to dispense with the offerings from other vendors.

“This is something that partners have been asking for for years,” said Rick Vanover, Director of Product Strategy for Veeam. “Partners want to move on from some of these other products for things like getting backups of clusters and backups of Linux systems. With this release, we are responding to this feedback.”

The key development here is the improvement of the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.1 and Veeam Agent for Linux v2. Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.1 now includes protection for mission-critical Microsoft Windows Server failover clusters. Veeam Agent for Linux v2 adds the ability to back up to a Veeam Cloud Connect repository, and provides support for scale-out backup repositories as backup targets, and source-side encryption.

“This release provides significant updates to the Veeam agents for Windows and Linux, to provide centralized agent deployment and management for virtual, physical and cloud-based workloads,” Vanover said. “It lets you put Veeam technology in any part of the data centre.”

This improved agent management capability is one of the elements that had been scheduled for Veeam 10, which have been moved up since they were ready for market now. Another is new support for IBM and Lenovo storage integrations, which are available through Veeam’s new Universal Storage API interface, designed to allow Veeam to more rapidly support new storage integrations with all vendors going forward.

“We also made the decision to make the support for the integration of IBM and Lenovo available now,” Vanover said. “Partners have access now to these already, so they can be familiar with them.”

The expanded IBM support includes IBM Spectrum Virtualize integration, which extends Veeam storage snapshot integration capabilities to IBM Storwize and SAN Volume Controller based storage arrays. The new Lenovo support provides snapshot integration for the Lenovo Storage V Series. The Lenovo DS series was also recently certified as Veeam Ready as a target for primary backup storage.

Another new feature, which Vanover described as really important, is the Cloud Connect Recycle Bin.

“The problem it solves is where an organization has a situation where backups are deleted either by user sabotage or by ransomware,” he said. “The Cloud Connect Recycle Bin is an out-of-band retention that the end user cannot delete. The contents of this recycle bin are maintained are not accessible by any authentication on the customer network, so ransomware can’t see it. It’s a powerful mechanism that service providers can offer as a value-add to Veeam offerings. It provides them with an interesting differentiator, that gives organizations piece of mind.”

Vanover said that the hard work of R&D around this was done when Veeam originally built the Cloud Connect backup storage-as-a-service several years back.

“Adding the recycle bin was not that much work because the heavy lifting was done with the original Cloud Connect,” he noted. “We also added replication engines, and a mechanism for the channel to offer this without even setting up an infrastructure, in order to get recurring revenue.”

Veeam Availability Suite 9.5.3 also adds support for the VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as the latest versions of Windows Server and SQL Server.

“Platform support has always been a big deal for us,” Vanover stressed.