Veeam Releases New Data Platform with Direct Backup to Object Storage

Veeam Software promises to ease recovery from ransomware attacks with its new data protection platform’s direct backup to object storage capability. Previewed last year, Veeam released the Veeam Data Platform on Tuesday, joined by four partners with compatible object storage hardware.

The storage hardware providers rolling out solutions with the new Veeam Data Platform include Cloudian, Object First, Pure Storage and Scality. Object First, a startup launched last year by Veeam founders Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov, simultaneously released its on-premises S3-compatible object backup appliance.

The Veeam Data Platform is the backup and recovery vendor’s new brand that the company offers in three SKUs. The base-level Foundation Edition consists of Veeam Backup and Recovery (VBR) with the new v12 version. The Advanced Edition includes the Veeam ONE monitoring and observability tool. The Premium Edition includes everything in the Advanced Edition plus the Veeam Recovery Orchestrator.

Veeam’s Danny Allan

“We wanted to unify the platform into a single component,” said Danny Allan, Veeam’s CTO and senior VP of product strategy.

Big Capabilities

While Allan said the new VBR v12 release has 500 new capabilities, the ability to send backups to object storage “is the biggest one by far,” he told Channel Futures.

Anthony Cusimano, Object First’s director of technical marketing, said Veeam’s new platform approach will enable the company to expand its capabilities faster.

Object First’s Anthony Cusimano

“I think they are modernizing with their shift to become more platform-oriented and by supporting direct object storage, which is what we’re playing into,” Cusimano said. “They’re paving the way for rapid expansion and growth.”

Veeam first added backups to object storage with the release of VBR v10 two years ago. But the new version now enables the protection of primary backups. Historically, object storage lacked the necessary performance to support direct primary backups. But recently, object storage architectures have become more robust.

For its part, Allan noted that Veeam developed its Smart Object Storage API (SOSAPI), which the company designed to boost performance further. Veeam’s direct-to-object storage capability avoids transitional hops that could reduce performance and reliability. SOS can route traffic through a gateway without a direct network connection to object storage. It also allows direct backups to cloud object storage services.

Ensuring Ransomware Recovery

The most significant advantage of sending primary backups to object storage is that it ensures all the backups are immutable. That’s critical when an organization faces a ransomware incident because it ensures the attacker can’t change or delete the data.

According to Veeam, the VBR v12 ensures the native immutability capabilities of on-premises and cloud object storage providers. It means that ransomware attackers cannot modify, encrypt or delete recent backups based on the number of days specified. Also, customers’ long-term grandfather-father-son (GFS) backups automatically remain immutable through the defined retention policy.

Underscoring its confidence in the new platform’s ability to enable recovery from a ransomware attack, Veeam is offering a guarantee. The guarantee requires customers to use the premium version of the platform and meet baseline requirements. Also, a customer making a claim must validate that they adhered to Veeam’s best practices, including having three geo-distributed backups. Veeam will pay $5 million to any customer unable to recover their backups from a ransomware incident.