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Veeam Availability Suite v10 adds NAS backup and cloud tiering
Availability Suite is mostly about consolidating the company’s data management platform idea, but it has added incremental forever NAS backup, cloud tiering and recovery to vSphere
Backup product maker Veeam has launched version 10 of its Availability Suite. Key additions in this full-number upgrade include NAS backup, and the ability to recover virtual and physical machines to a VMware virtual machine (VM).
Also added are immediate S3 cloud copies with immutability, which can be useful against ransomware attacks.
The marketing around the product emphasises the all-round data management and cloud capability of the suite, but new features include, somewhat surprisingly, NAS backup that can be incremental forever.
Veeam already had NAS backup (via NAS backup protocol NDMP) to tape.
The innovation claimed in v10 is that Veeam has got round the requirement in NDMP that means a full copy must be made after every nine incrementals. This is done with so-called Changed File Tracking, which checks whether a file has been changed and, if so, backs it up anew, somewhat like Changed Block Tracking in VMware. That allows for incremental forever in NAS backup with Veeam.
Michael Cade, senior global technologist at Veeam, said: “It’s the biggest gap we see in the market from Veeam’s point of view. There’s a huge amount of NAS out there.”
The biggest challenge, said Cade, has been to deal with the nine-day maximum between fulls in NDMP. “That first full takes a long, long time, and then 10 days later you have to take another,” he said. “NDMP dictates it. It was built in 1996 and was EOLed in 2010, but our competitors still use it. It was a big challenge, but we got round it.”
The NAS backup functionality allows customers to back up via SMB, NFS and Windows and Linux file server formats.
Another addition is the ability to recover virtual and physical machine backups to a VMware VM.
This is called Multi VM Instant Recovery. Customers can back up VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix virtual machines, or Windows or Linux physical servers, and recover them to VMware, Hyper-V or AWS or Azure cloud storage.
Previously that was possible to Hyper-V, but now Veeam has added vSphere to that.
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Finally, Veeam has improved its cloud tiering capability, which now allows for instant tiering of backups and workloads to capacity S3 storage in the public cloud.
In the previous setup, data could not be moved off-premise immediately. Now data is written almost simultaneously to local and cloud S3 storage, with metadata retained on-site.
Data is tiered off in chunks and can be restored in a granular way, so customers do not rack up cloud egress charges.
To this has also been added the ability to make data immutable.
This functionality is touted as a way of protecting an organisation against ransomware.
Veeam made its name as a provider of backup software for virtual servers when the virtualisation revolution swept datacentres a decade ago. It has since become a market leader among backup providers.
Last month, the company was bought by Insight Partners for $5bn in a move that will see the departure of its Russian founders, Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov.
