Veeam Eyes Hybrid Cloud with Partnerships, Updated Software

VEEAMON 2019 — Veeam Software, which specializes in data management and backup, made its bones over the last 10 years with backup and disaster recovery solutions for virtual machines from the likes of VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. The company, however, continues to expand into hybrid cloud, which it says will be the next big opportunity for data backup, recovery and management.

On the first day of the VeeamON 2019 show in Miami, company officials unveiled plans to expand its reach into secondary storage through technology partnerships and also introduced Veeam Availability Orchestrator V2, which they said will help democratize the data recovery (DR) process by making it easier, less costly and more comprehensive.

It comes at a time when massive amounts of data are being generated, stored, processed and analyzed in multiple places, from the core data center to the public cloud — and now the edge. The distributed and hybrid nature of the current data-centric IT environment presents challenges around managing, moving and protecting the data.

Veeam’s Ratmir Timashev

“Data management and data protection in the hybrid cloud is the next big opportunity,” Ratmir Timashav, Veeam co-founder and executive vice president for sales and marketing, told journalists and analysts before the morning keynote address.

It fits in with the message Veeam has been touting in recent years, according to Krista Macomber, senior analyst with Storage Switzerland.

“Their thing is that things are changing again,” Macomber told Channel Futures, noting that much of the company’s first 10 years were built on its work with VMs. “They want to support all these different environments with the same platform.”

A key offering is the Veeam Availability Suite, a platform that ensures data availability for workloads in physical, virtual, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and other cloud environments through a single management console, and includes monitoring and analytics, orchestration, backup and replication and API integrations. Over the last couple of years, Veeam has delivered new features to the suite, from universal storage APIs and cloud mobility to cloud tiers, cloud-ready instance licensing and direct restore to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure Stack.

Veeam comes into this new hybrid cloud phase with some momentum. Timashav said that over the past year the company’s annual bookings have run past $1 billion and it now has more than 350,000 customers. That compares with the 6,000 customers Veeam had 10 years ago. The company is adding 4,000 new customers every month and about 50,000 every year.

UnitedHealthcare has been a Veeam customer for about 10 years. Jeremy Brummett, senior manager of infrastructure and operations at UnitedHealthcare, said during the keynote that “data is incredibly important to us. We base every visit someone has with the doctor, every interaction someone has with their health-care provider … on data, and all that data is stored.”

This includes electronic medical records (EMR), which follow patients wherever they go, Brummett said. The company is sticking with Veeam because of the ease of use and reliablity of its software, and its support for a range of platforms. Given the ongoing struggle with ransomware, data protection also is key.

That’s an important part of the latest version of Veeam Availability Orchestrator. It lets enterprises recover individual workloads or entire sites from backups rather than having to run multiple systems in different places, such as on-premises and the cloud. Being able to recover from backups is less costly, which will make DR capabilities more affordable and available to more companies, according to Danny Allen, vice president of product strategy at Veeam. In addition, the software also enables organizations to test the recovered data automatically before it is put back into production to ensure there are no hidden threats, and then lets the customer document the recovered sites for executives.

The company also is looking to expand its reach in the secondary storage space through technology partnerships. Veeam has partnerships with …

… Dell EMC, IBM, Cisco and, most recently, Fujitsu in primary storage, leveraging Veeam’s universal storage APIs.

Two weeks ago, the company announced a partnership with cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure software provider Nutanix on a new offering called Nutanix Mine with Veeam, a Nutanix appliance integrated with Veeam’s software. It’s in beta now and will be available later this year.

The company also has partnered with ExaGrid for ExaGrid Backup with Veeam.

Veeam plans to expand the number of such partnerships through its “with Veeam” programs, using APIs to help create a larger ecosystem of enterprise storage providers whose hyperconverged infrastructure appliances will carry the Veeam software, Timashav said.

“Our goal is to build a broad ecosystem of secondary storage partners,” he said.

The “with Veeam” program is designed to offer customers a variety of configurations that will include scale-up and scale-out options, but a single SKU that includes the installed software and right-sized hardware.