Introduction

I’m back form attending, speaking, learning and sharing experiences and knowledge at VeeamON 2017 (and DELL EMC World before). It was a blast and I had the opportunity to engage in very interesting discussions with experts from around the globe.

As it was a Veeam event it wil be no surprise that we got some very interesting information about the new Veeam offerings now as well as in the near future. Points of particular interest to me are:

• Veeam backup for file shares. Really this might solve my entire dubio around virtualizing very large capacity clustered files shares (100-200TB) I have to protect. I’m looking forward to testing and leveraging the various restore options like File share rollback. Handy when ransomware just struck.
• I like what Veeam is doing for disaster recovery in Microsoft’s Azure public cloud. Veeam’s Direct Restore and new Power Network (PN) in order to facilitate and automate the disaster recovery process.
• The Veeam agent that can protect Windows ad Linux based physical servers and endpoints, along with applications running in Microsoft Azure, AWS and other public clouds tied into Veeam Backup & Replication. We will also get support for failover clusters with this. Something I have been lobbying for!
• They support native object storage support using Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Microsoft Azure Blob etc.
• They announced improved and extended Office 365 protection including OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. One of those improvements is very handy with multiple tenants.

Ramsomware did something very significant beyond reminding everyone of the importance of recoverable backups and that is reigniting the interest in tape as a backup medium. The inherent “air gap” that tape offers has become more interesting to many people as ransomware can also delete or encrypt backups. So the 3-2-1 rule has never been more important and is being extended by additional rules of thumb. The product to investigate for me is Starwind Virtual Tape Library (VTL). What I like is that I can have an air gapped backup integrated with Veeam in Amazon AWS. Even while my entire business might run in Azure, this separates my data protection technology and location form my production / development environment. Ideal for maximum isolation to protect us form both external and insider threats and risks while avoiding the need to deal with physical tapes. This is and remains a major concern for operational costs and RTO.

Conclusion

The new capabilities are very welcome to help solve the challenges we have now and the ones we see coming in the near future. We have plenty of ideas and plans to build the next generation of data protection and data availability solutions. Whatever the need, on-premises, IAAS, PAAS, SAAS, private/hybrid/public cloud, the need to protect data against loss and down time is there in one form or another. That is and remains a primary responsibility of any business regardless of the technology. As always, my fellow MVPs and Vanguards are ready, willing and able to get the job done.