While CloudPoint 1.0 was all about snapshotting, 2.0 layers on additional data protection capabilities. It’s available now for Azure and Google, with AWS not that far off.
Today, Veritas Technologies is announcing the expansion of their snapshot-based CloudPoint technology. CloudPoint 1.0, introduced last year, provided native snapshot-based capabilities for public cloud platforms. CloudPoint 2.0, being announced today, extends the snapshotting capability with broader data protection capabilities. At this point, only versions of CloudPoint 2.0 optimized for the Azure and Google public clouds are supported, although an AWS version is reportedly in the works.
“We are seeing a significant shift in the market, where more workloads are being moved out to run in the cloud that were previously in the data centre,” said Alex Sakaguchi, Senior Director of Global Cloud Solutions Marketing at Veritas. “There is a requirement to ensure that this data in the cloud is adequately protected. The cloud providers have tools which are native to the cloud, but they have issues, and are designed for their own cloud. The reality is that we live in a multi-cloud world. Companies which make data protection for the data centre say that their legacy technologies will work in the cloud, and they do work, but they are not optimized for the cloud environment. It can be expensive for organizations to deploy these technologies in the cloud as well.”
CloudPoint 1.0, which Veritas introduced last year, provided a cloud-native, multi-cloud solution. It was limited, however, by only providing snapshot orchestration.
“The taking of a cloud snapshot is important for point-in-time recovery, and is a step in the right direction, but is not a full answer in itself,” Sakaguchi said. “The snapshot capability allows for the recovery data, and is non-agent based and very quick. for aggressive SLAs. With CloudPoint 2.0, we have layered on data protection, to provide the next layer of capability and a much fuller solution, with automation, auto-discovery and recovery capability. We are really excited about these data protection capabilities that we are layering on the snapshotting, which expand the use cases significantly.”
The Google and Azure solutions are somewhat different, reflecting the different nature of the two clouds.
“There is no fundamental difference in the technology from the Veritas side, but there is a fundamental difference between what you can do in Google and what you can do in Azure,” Sakaguchi said. “There are different reasons why customers use Google or Azure, and we try and cater to those.”
Sakaguchi said that the Google Cloud has made some interesting and innovative steps towards machine learning.
“We have used this ourselves at Veritas, and we see a lot of customers doing that as well,” he said. “Google has a large portion on the mindshare there.”
With the Google Cloud, CloudPoint 2.0 brings application consistency to Google Cloud Platform’s Persistent Disk snapshots, indexing for single file restores, replication for disaster recovery readiness and search capabilities that make it easy to find and delete personally identifiable informations. With the Azure Cloud, CloudPoint 2.0 supports the Infrastructure-as-a-Services capabilities of that cloud.
“CloudPoint 2.0 gives customers a simple dashboard to manage all their operations with enterprise capability,” Sakaguchi said. The ability to manage it all from within the Veritas NetBackup Console is also coming very soon.”
Also coming soon will be support for the missing cloud – AWS.
“We are on the same path with AWS, but are not as far along,” Sakaguchi said. Still, he indicated that full support would be extended to that cloud sooner rather than later.
“CloudPoint will work on AWS today, but we are working with AWS on a more optimized version,” he indicated.
