Veeam, the virtualized server backup business, said yesterday it has achieved a billion dollar annual run rate and is adding 4,000 customers a month.
The company wants to spread its wings beyond data protection and move into cloud data management. It revealed its ambitions at At VeeamON 2019 its conference in Miami, along with the news of a bunch of storage partnerships, and a DR orchestrator.
Cloud data management
Ratmir Timashev, co-founder and EVP sales and marketing, said in a scripted quote: “Veeam created the VMware backup market and has dominated it as the leader for the last decade. This was Veeam’s Act I and I am delighted that we have surpassed the $1 billion mark; in 2013 I predicted we’d achieve this in less than six years and we have.”
Veeam has passed the 350,000 customer count, is set on becoming a hybrid cloud data management company
Timashev said: “The market is now changing. Backup is still critical, but customers are now building hybrid clouds with AWS, Azure, IBM and Google, and they need more than just backup. To succeed in this changing environment, Veeam has had to adapt.”
He thinks data management will be Act II for the company – and that Veeam is well positioned for this business. Certainly it has a good foundation on which to build, as backup is a prime generator of data managed in the cloud.
Storage supplier partnerships
As a start Veeam is setting up “with Veeam” partnerships with tenterprise storage and hyperconverged (HCI) vendors to provide customers with secondary storage systems. These combine Veeam software with storage and HCI infrastructure hardware and management stacks.
The functionality will include secondary storage and copy data management. Veeam APIs play a role here and the company said it has a data management stack.
Veeam has already announced deals with ExaGrid and Nutanix. Timashev expects others to materialise and said they can include a single SKU from infrastructure vendors’ price lists and single support points of contact.
Some “with Veeam” systems will be sold and serviced directly from an infrastructure partner. Others will be sourced by distribution and/or global system integrators, depending on geography or partner network.
Western Digital has ensured its storage systems are compatible with Veeam, including:
- ActiveScale Cloud Object Storage System, supporting Veeam Cloud Tier via its S3-compatible interface,
- Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 JBOD/JBOF storage,
- IntelliFlash NVMe N-series.
Net:net
Blocks & Files thinks backup is inherently straightforward: backup my data and virtual machines fast and restore them fast when I need it.
There is no such simple rubric for data management, which entails indexing, search, analytics, copy provision and management, compliance and governance. Nevertheless, backup is a highly sticky application, and twinning data management with backup will give Veeam a good start.
Somewhat surprisingly it claims to be “the unequivocal leader in Cloud Data Management” already. Blocks & Files will wait for independent analysis from the likes of Gartner and IDC before taking a view on that claim.
DR Orchestrator
And let’s not forget this week’s product launch, the Veeam Availability Orchestrator v2.0. VAO v2 adds disaster recovery, operational recovery of production virtual machines and platform migrations to any organisation that uses Veeam’s backup and replication capabilities.
Veeam protection data can be used to prove recoverability, SLA adherence, and regulatory compliance. VAO v2 can automatically test, document and recover entire sites down to individual workloads from backups.
Backup and replication data can be used through VAO v2 by DevOps, patch and upgrade testers and for analytics. This extension of VAO to providing data for re-use take Veeam into competition with secondary storage players offering copy data supply and management. That means Actifio, Cohesity and Delphix .
VAO v2 is available now.
