VeeamON 2017 unveils new features and initiatives in the Big Easy

By Shereen Shabnam

One of the take home messages from the recent VeemON 2017 conference in New Orleans was understanding how Veeam enables its resellers and service providers to help customers move to and manage data in a Multi-Cloud or Hybrid Cloud environment, while greatly expanding the total addressable market to manage and protect public cloud and physical workloads.

With a number of key announcements, we learnt how the new Veeam Accredited Service Partner (VASP) program drives partner services revenue and engagement, with award-winning support as well as how Veeam is strengthening its leadership position with two models - Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster recovery as a Service (DRaaS) market. We bring you highlights from each day of the conference in New Orleans.

DAY 1 Highlights 

The day started with a keynote by Peter McKay, Co-CEO and President of Veeam on the need for availability, which was the theme of this year’s VeemOn event. He touched on Veeam’s growth, market share, and why Availability is a requirement for Digital Transformation.

The team also announced that Veeam Software, the innovative provider of solutions that delivers Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™, is unveiling several partner-centric initiatives and offerings to help them drive revenue growth and leverage business opportunities as customers move to a Multi-Cloud or Hybrid Cloud environment.

The new offerings in Veeam ‘Always-On Cloud’ Availability Platform enable service providers and resellers to help customers migrate to and manage data in a Multi-Cloud environment while greatly expanding revenue opportunities to manage and protect public cloud and physical workloads.

The new offerings and programs, specifically designed and priced for service delivery model, include and support:

• Migrating, Managing and Protecting Public cloud (AWS, Microsoft Azure and other) workloads, physical servers and endpoints with NEW Veeam Availability Console and Veeam Agents;
• Protecting Enterprise Mission-Critical Applications with NEW Veeam CDP and vCloud Director Integration for greatly-enhanced Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) capabilities;
• Tape as a Service to help customers meet compliance requirements for archival and retention;
• Microsoft Office 365 with NEW Multi-Tenancy, multi-repository and automation capabilities in Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365;
• A NEW Veeam Cloud and Service Provider Directory to connect VARs and VCSPs;
• Increased Professional Services Revenue and customer satisfaction with the NEW Veeam Accredited Service Provider program.

To understand the brand’s reach, we learn that Veeam has 47,000 Veeam ProPartners and 15,000 VCSPs offering backup and disaster recovery services, including 2,900 partners who use Veeam Cloud Connect to offer backup and disaster recovery in the Cloud.

During the different sessions through the day and with endorsements from partners, customers and resellers, it was evident that Veeam is a preferred and an indispensable partner for innovative cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions to help global customers protect critical business applications and data.

DAY 2 Highlights

Day 2 revealed how Veeam brings powerful innovations designed to deliver to consumers a seamless Digital Life experience. Users want the confidence of knowing that their information is available whenever and wherever they need it. The key take home messages from the second day that the NEW Veeam Availability Suite v10 drives non-stop business continuity, digital transformation agility and analytics & visibility to new levels.

We also learnt how NEW Veeam CDP helps customers to protect and recover Tier-1 and mission-critical applications and that the NEW Veeam Availability for AWS offers industry’s first cloud-native, agentless backup and Availability solution to protect AWS apps and data. The NEW Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows provides ‘Always-On Cloud’ Availability for Windows-based physical servers and endpoints, as well as applications running in Microsoft Azure, AWS and other public clouds.

It was also announced that the NEW Extending Veeam ‘Always-On Cloud’ Availability Platform with new Universal Storage API framework; IBM, Lenovo and Infididat join Veeam’s storage partner ecosystem.

Veeam helps businesses across the globe enable seamless Digital Life experiences with Veeam Availability Suite for the 'Always on Cloud' and Veeam Availability Suite delivers a fundamentally new kind of solution by providing the following:

• Non-Stop Business Continuity to deliver user confidence that their Digital Life will be available when, where and how they want it. Instantly recover – cross-cloud anything to anywhere. Backup, replication and continuous data protection (CDP) for Multi-Cloud or Hybrid Cloud environment wherever it is: private, public, managed or SaaS;
• Digital Transformation Agility provides easy, secure and reliable cross-cloud data management and migration. Choose your Cloud, your way. Veeam delivers a software-defined, hardware and cloud agnostic platform so you can adapt to user requirements as they change;
• Analytics and Visibility with actionable insights for data management, operational performance and compliance across your entire infrastructure. Enterprises can now monitor, analyze and act with confidence. Veeam and its ecosystem of partners provide robust data analytics and discovery, simplified data management, workflow automation and more.

According to Peter McKay, co-CEO and President at Veeam. “As enterprises move to the Cloud, Veeam ensures Availability of services, applications and data in Multi-Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud environments.

He added, “Over the last 10 years Veeam has been the primary innovator in the space, with many industry first capabilities and highly differentiated solutions for private, managed, public and SaaS clouds, and at VeeamON we’re raising the bar even further. With these new innovations across the Platform and ecosystem, Veeam is once again pioneering the market.”

DAY 3 Highlights

Day 3 saw us doing more interviews with key Veeam management and we learnt how Veeam and Microsoft Extend Storage Alliance will Deliver Unprecedented Availability for the Always-On Cloud.

Veeam enables businesses to deliver the Digital Life experience users expectation by protecting applications and data running in Hybrid Cloud and leveraging cloud backup and disaster recovery based on Microsoft Azure and Veeam ‘Always-On Cloud’ Availability Platform for non-stop business continuity, agility and lower costs.

Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™ has new capabilities protecting applications and data running in Hybrid Cloud, leveraging backup and disaster recovery based on Microsoft Azure and Veeam “Always-On Cloud” Availability Platform.

When a disaster strikes, businesses of all sizes need a reliable solution for on-demand DR in the cloud. Day 3 highlighted the long-standing alliance between Veeam and Microsoft that allows customers to benefit from the following:

• Non-Stop Business Continuity – leveraging cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) based on Veeam “Always-On Cloud” Availability Platform and Azure
• Digital Transformation Agility – through easy, secure and reliable Veeam-powered cross-cloud data management and migration to leverage Azure’s agility and flexibility
• Reduced cost by utilizing Veeam’s flexible platform and Azure consumption model

The cloud makes disaster recovery affordable for businesses of any size, but many of them still struggle to properly manage the complex disaster recovery process, including data restore and network setup and configuration for seamless user experience.

The NEW Veeam Disaster Recovery in Microsoft Azure simplifies and automates a disaster recovery in Azure, helping businesses maintain business continuity and availability of critical workloads with all-encompassing on-demand DR in Azure. Veeam DR in Azure combines Veeam Direct Restore and NEW Veeam PN (Veeam Powered Network).

The NEW Veeam PN for Microsoft Azure is a powerful solution designed to simplify and automate the setup of a DR site in Azure using lightweight software-defined networking (SDN). It helps maintain business continuity and availability by eliminating the complexity of VPN deployments and is designed for businesses of all sizes and service providers.

Veeam also announced a new Scale Out Backup Repository (SOBR) support for cloud object storage as an Archive Tier extent. This new functionality, arriving with Veeam Availability Suite v10, enables customers to archive Veeam backups to Azure Blob storage. This native support helps customers to leverage Azure to reduce long-term data archival, retention and compliance costs.

Microsoft announced that it will enable all Azure customers to access and use disks in Azure up to 4TB in size (previously 1TB). This enhancement means Veeam customers can fully realize a more cost-effective solution using a Veeam virtual appliance to back up four times as much data in Azure Storage. This feature will be available mid 2017.

Veeam then announced an update to its SaaS Availability solution, Veeam Backup for Office 365, which more than 11,000 organizations are already using, just four months after release. In this update, a multi-tenant architecture enables protecting larger Office 365 deployments with a single installation, while empowering Veeam Cloud and Service Providers (VCSPs) to deliver Office 365 backup services.

Furthemore, Veeam has introduced enhanced automation options via RESTful API and PowerShell SDK to minimize management overheads, improve recovery times and reduce costs. And looking ahead, the next version of Veeam Backup for Office 365 is already in development, which will include much-requested support for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.