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When Veeam Software announced this week that it was expanding beyond VMware to offer support for Microsoft Hyper-V, the data protection firm doubled down on its commitment to become the leading provider of disaster recovery and management solutions for virtual data centers.
Virtualization backup and management firm Veeam Software this week took steps to double down on its commitment to become the leading provider of disaster recovery and management solutions for virtual data centers.
“Veeam’s view is that most organizations will virtualize close to 100 percent of their servers within the next few years, so the company has concentrated on creating the best backup and recovery solution possible for virtual environments,” Carrie Reber, vice president of marketing at Veeam told ServerWatch.
Veeam, founded in 2006, has built its name as a leading provider of virtualization backup and management technology for VMware (NYSE: VMW) environments. Indeed, the company now says that more than 150,000 VMware professionals around the world are using its FastSCP, a free tool for ESX file management.
Veeam recently announced the general availability of version 5.0 of its Backup and Recovery product, a product driven by the vPower technology it debuted in 2010. Veeam boasts that vPower, which it developed in-house, can provide instant recovery of a complete virtual machine from its backup while IT works on the issue that caused the problem. The central innovation of vPower is the capacity to run virtual machines in production or in a test environment from either standard backup storage or a compressed and deduplicated backup file, Reber explained.
“On the backup side, while server virtualization has become widely adopted in data centers worldwide, many organizations are still using previous-generation software designed for traditional x86 physical servers to back up data on virtual machines,” she said.
“Traditional backup software for physical servers requires an average of four to five hours of downtime to complete a backup, and often much more, and the backups don’t always restore reliably. What’s more, the old software is not only ineffective and unreliable in a virtual environment, but also wastes the opportunity to take advantage of the new possibilities that virtualization presents.”
From the management perspective, Veeam backs a product called Veeam ONE, which offers reporting and monitoring tools for VMware environments. With Veeam ONE, users can manage VMware and physical environments through either Microsoft System Center or HP Operations Manager in a unified console. Veeam expanded its product portfolio to couple VMware and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and HP enterprise management tools with the 2008 acquisition of nworks.
Now, Veeam is taking a big step beyond VMware with the inclusion of Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server in its Backup and Replication product. Veeam is demonstrating the new Hyper-V support this week at Microsoft’s TechEd conference in Atlanta. It plans to make it generally available in fourth quarter 2011.
For a company that built its name on VMware support, bringing Hyper-V into the fold represents not only the conviction that momentum for virtualization will continue to build, but also that the enterprise market is diversifying.
“Multi-hypervisor environments are quickly becoming the norm, not the exception, and that poses serious management challenges to IT organizations,” Ashish Nadkarni, a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group, said in a statement. “IT managers need to select virtualization management solutions, including backup and replication solutions, that can work with more than one hypervisor.”
Veeam founders Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov first partnered up with the 1997 founding of Aelita Software, a firm specializing in Windows Server systems management software. In 2004, Qwest Software snapped up Aelita, which ultimately sent Timashev and Baronov looking for a new venture, and they settled on virtualization. Veeam, with North American headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, has a management team that includes many veterans of Aelita, Reber said.
