The vRetreat Pt 2 – What did Veeam bring ?

Veeam – So what’s new ?

So in the 2nd part of the vRetreat blogpost I’d like to discuss what Veeam presented on the day.

Many of you will know Veeam very well and I’m hoping that at least some of you have heard of backup before. Instead of talking about the what the company does I’d like to focus on the message that Michael Cade (Technical Evangelist) was keen to relay about the change in direction for the company.

The company has enjoyed a lot of success over the last 9 years. I was an early customer in a previous life and knew the power and simplicity of the software back in 2008 but how times have changed.

With the new world bringing about the advent of workloads in public cloud it was time Veeam thought about how backup and restore would work for workloads not managed in a traditional on premises VMware hypervisor. Agentless backup has always been the riding theme for the company but they now appreciate that physical and cloud workloads are what customer are demanding to be backed up. Cue the new Agent World.

Veeam now have agents for Windows and Linux machines and have the ability to restore VMs to Microsoft Azure. Backup for workloads in Azure and AWS is where Veeam have started first in order to tackle the vast majority of public cloud workloads. Availability for the Enterprise had to be rethought and reimagined in order for the company to continue to set the pace of innovation and moving to new areas of protection is a bold and decisive move.

Veeam Backup for Office 365 came out in 2016 and again the emphasis for the company is protecting and securing emails that are held in the cloud as we all know MS don’t hold themselves accountable to be able to get these back from a set point in time.

Lastly, orchestration for D.R. is another focus area for the company and a new product called Veeam Availability Orchestrator will aim to bridge the gap that SRM has covered so well. This will be launched sometime in 2017 and another example of the company covering all bases to simplify D.R.

Clearly, the company has come on leaps and bounds over recent years and getting into the cloud game is a strategic move that was called for. Agentless vs. Agents could be debated for many hours but the clear message here is that whatever method is used, it is always imperative that the backups succeed and the restores work flawlessly.

Thanks to Veeam and Michael Cade for taking the time out to talk to the group.