Recently Veeam Software, the leader in backup solutions that deliver cloud data management kicked off VeeamON, their annual data management event – featuring live and interactive experiences from IT leaders to help accelerate digital transformation journeys.
Enterprise IT News spoke to Anthony Spiteri, Senior Global Technologist, Product Strategy at Veeam Software to find out more on the announcements.
EITN: VeeamON 2020 just recently concluded. For you, what were the top 3 product/technology announcements that stood out for you?
Anthony: Through VeeamON 2020, we introduced numerous product updates, as well as sneak previews for future releases. The top 3 announcements included:
Additional support for Teams in Backup for Microsoft Office 365 (VBO) v5
Laying out the foundation of top line new features and enhancements in Veeam Availability Suite (VAS) v11
New version of Backup for AWS
Anthony Spiteri, Senior Global Technologist, Product Strategy, Veeam
EITN: What are the details of these product/technology announcements, and how will they be deployed?
Anthony: Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v5 – Over the last couple of months, usage of Microsoft Teams around the globe has increased to more than 75 million daily active users as we transition into work from home environments. Through the new v5 update, it will be easier for users quickly restore and find documents and files from within Microsoft Teams. Through VBO, Teams now has its own explorer which is used for restore operations. The full support for Teams includes the following capabilities:
Reliable Teams Backup: Protect Teams data but also channels, settings and tabs
Industry-leading Restores: Provides a fast and easy recovery experience built for Teams
Unmatched eDiscovery: Enables granular search and find across Teams component
Veeam Availability Suite v11 – VeeamON allowed us to put forth some exclusive look and demos to the v11 update. Multiple new features were demonstrated in the following areas:
Near Continuous Data Protection (CDP): Provides VM replication with Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) of seconds for tier-one VMware vSphere workloads
Object Storage Integrations: Leverage the cloud to extend scale-out backup repository capacity with Google Cloud Storage support for Capacity Tier, reduce long term retention costs with AWS Glacier, AWS Glacier Deep Archive and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage Archive Tier support for Archive Tier
Instant Recovery: Enhanced instant recovery with instant recovery of ANY backup to a Microsoft Hyper-V VM, instant publishing of NAS Backup content, and instant recovery of Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle database
Veeam Backup for AWS v2 – The latest update to Backup for AWS is already out and comes just six months after the release of v1. In the new version, features like Snapshot Replication that replicates Amazon EBS snapshots across AWS accounts and regions has also been included. Other enhancements and capabilities include:
AWS disaster recovery to protect against regional outages by replicating and recovering Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots across AWS accounts and AWS Regions
Integration with the newly released changed block tracking (CBT) API to shrink backup windows as well as compute and storage costs
Application consistent snapshots and backups of running Amazon EC2 instances without shutting down or disconnecting attached Amazon EBS volumes
Public RESTful API to securely connect external applications and workflows to integrate with and manage Veeam Backup for AWS
EINT: What was the role of technology in making VeeamON 2020 happen? Are there any VeeamON technologies responsible for enabling this event?
Anthony: While it has been a tradition to host guests in Las Vegas, we had to switch this year’s event to a virtual event with the ongoing global pandemic. Having a virtual event meant that we had to rely on technology to host the online platform where we welcome guests. We did not leverage on any Veeam technologies to enable VeeamON.
EITN: What do these announcements and the features of these technologies, mean for customers and your partners?
Anthony: All the product updates and announcements from VeeamON were made with our customers, partners and end-users in mind. We would not have been able to make some of these changes possible if not for the constant feedback provided by our customers and partners.
When data is lost, our customers and partners will require to recover them as quickly as possible. Through our latest updates, we have further enhanced our products and services to enable users go beyond just data recovery.
Let’s use VBO as an example – Microsoft does not provide users with a comprehensive backup of Office 365 data but here in Veeam, it is something that we take pride in. Having access to historical data is important for most of our customers and now with many transitioning to the Teams platform for easy communication and file sharing, users get to benefit out of the backup service that will be made available.
