The partnership aims to combine Veeam’s availability software with Hedvig’s software-defined backup repository, creating a technologically advanced and versatile backup and recovery combination. Hedvig indicated that other deep technology partnership to create joint solutions are in the works.
Ediz Ertekin, Hedvig’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations
Software-defined storage vendor Hedvig has announced a new partnership with Veeam, in which Hedvig has been approved as a Veeam Ready Repository. It’s an extremely significant partnership for Hedvig, which marks an increased focus for them on the secondary storage market.
The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform lets customers to create an elastic storage system using low-cost, x86 commodity servers, to support any application, hypervisor, container or cloud. It does this by using multi-protocol support to collapse disparate tiers of storage and unify block, file, and object interfaces in a single platform. This creates the elasticity that allows for allocation of data by workload-optimized servers, and makes it unnecessary to organize SAN, NAS and object storage separately.
“Our solution is used both for transformational engagements around primary storage, and also more transactional engagements,” said Ediz Ertekin, Hedvig’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations. “Our technology relationships allow us to play on both ends of the spectrum – transformational and transactional. Transformational projects are a longer journey and generally involve collaboration with global systems integrators. The transactional ones are around supplier and technology relationships which can expand to the transformational side of the business. On the primary storage side, we focus with vendors like HPE and Mesophere, and on the secondary side, we look at modern alternatives. Veeam is a very viable, modern player in data protection.”
Much of Hedvig’s initial focus as it expands its market presence has been in primary storage, including a major strategic partnership announced a year ago with HPE. The Veeam partnership is directed at the secondary storage market, and increasing Hedvig’s presence there.
“We have decided to increase our focus on the secondary data market, by going after antiquated repository options in the backup space,” Ertekin said. “In the last decade, the standard in backup has been some version of the [Symantec-Veritas] NetBackup and [Dell-EMC] Data Domain combination, with backup software and a repository. A vendor like Veeam introduces modern alternatives and caters to a virtualized world, and eventually a containerized world. We complement that by modernizing the data repository where they back up, to enable instant recovery of VMs in the cloud to minimize downtime, with our scale-out x86 commodity server architecture. We have also made a lot of progress in the past several months in introducing key enterprise capabilities for data protection, like our Encrypt360, and we will continue to increase those capabilities.”
Ertekin said that the Veeam partnership is of enormous assistance to Hedvig in advancing this strategy.
“We can move the game to the next level, and the collaboration with Veeam allows us to offer a complete solution instead of just replacing the repository,” he stated. “Veeam is also much further ahead of the game. They have a very strong market presence and experience in this space. We are the younger player, so this relationship is much bigger to us as a result.”
Hedvig has a limited number of vendor strategic partners – eight in total, including Veeam.
“Our strategic partners tend to be triggered by customer relationships,” Erekin said. “We are relatively focused in the number of vendors we work with, instead of engaging with everyone.”
Their only other integration in the backup and availability space has been with Veritas.
“We are agnostic in this space, and the two relationships are similar, but the level of collaboration with Veritas has been more limited,” Ertekin said. “The Veeam partnership – and its strategic nature – evolved quickly. Veeam is a powerful combination as an alternative to Rubrik in this space.”
For now, the Hedvig-Veeam relationship is a technology partnership, but there is a possibility that this may be extending to a go-to-market relationship as well.
“There has been strong interest in this from both Veeam and ourselves,” Ertekin said. “The question is – can we take it to the next level. It starts with customers increasing the appetite on both sides – and that’s what we are working at now. We are establishing lighthouse references, and the next step is getting it to 8-10 of these and then taking it from there.”
Ertekin also indicated that more deeper partnerships with other vendors may be forthcoming.
“Up to now, we have focused on delivering a software defined storage option and customers have full freedom of selecting their own server, although we do have a strategic relationship with HPE, as does Veeam,” he said “Our partners have said that there is quite a bit of interest in creating joint bundles with a single throat to choke. We have experimented with them, and are aiming to introduce them in a much more formal fashion to increase channel momentum. So far, we have basically found the customer and then brought a partner in. With the bundles and expanded offerings, a customer will be able to buy an x86 server with Hedvig installed. That will dramatically simplify the offering for partners.”
