Veeam challenges Veritas and Commvault with new backup tools for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Office 365

As it continues its push into the enterprise sector and challenges industry heavyweights Commvault and Veritas, Veeam is broadening its feature set to offer more backup and disaster recovery features for on-premises and public cloud services. Over the next few slides we highlight some of their bigger announcements from VeeamOn 2017.

Pictured: VeeamOn co-CEO and president Peter McKay, co-founder Ratmir Timashev and president of Veeam global cloud group Paul Mattes

Backup for Amazon Web Services

According to the vendor, Veeam’s Availability for AWS, delivered through a partnership with N2WS, is the industry’s first “agentless, cloud-native agentless backup and availability solution designed to protect and recover AWS applications and data”. The solution provides an interface overview of a customer’s AWS services and VM instances that can be selected, backed up and stored independently from the underlying AWS infrastructure.

Disaster recovery for Microsoft Azure

A solution designed to simplify the restoration of workloads to Microsoft Azure without the necessity to have an Azure VM running prior to backup. Using another of Veeam’s updates called Veeam PM, on-premises workloads can be switched over to Azure hosting within minutes. The solution aims to provide automated, on-demand DR to the public cloud.

The update also includes native support for Azure Cloud Object Storage (Azure Blob storage), allowing for archived Veeam backups to be stored in Azure, intended to reduce data archiving and long-term compliance costs for Veeam backups. Microsoft added that, from mid 2017, customers would now be granted access to Azure disks up to 4TB in storage, up from 1TB.

Veeam Backup for Office 365 1.5

An update to a popular extension to Veeam’s Office 365 backup product. This update adds multi-tenancy, expected to allow the protection of larger Office 365 deployments on a single installation. Veeam also announced the update included better automation and supplier control options through a RESTful API and Powershell SDK. Further to 1.5, Veeam announced that Backup for Office 365 will support OneDrive and Sharepoint at version 2.

Protection for NAS, physical servers and CDP

Veeam Availability Suite v10 extends the platform to include physical servers and network attached storage, while continuous data protection (CDP) for managed public clouds promises to allow setting of recovery points every 15 seconds.

Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0

Pitching to solve the issues around the inability for some physical servers to be replicated due to regulatory issues, the update provides enterprise level backup and recovery for workstations and windows physical servers, including those running in the cloud. The workloads can be backup off-site to a cloud service provider using Veeam Cloud Connect.

Tape as a Service (TaaS)

Part of new functionality introduced with Veeam Availability Suite v10, Veeam has added a direct tape-out feature from its software that is designed to give providers additional service options for clients still demanding legacy backup and storage.

Adds IBM, Lenovo and Infinidat into storage API

Veeam has added new partners IBM, Lenovo and Infinidat to its strategic alliance partners list, that already includes HPE, Cisco, NetApp, Dell EMC, Nimble Storage and Exagrid, and brings the new partners into the fold of Veeam’s universal storage API framework. This is expected to ease storage backup implementation with these vendors.