VeeamON: Availability of Veeam Orchestrator V3

Veeam Software, Inc. leveraged the technology general session at VeeamON 2020, an online data management event, to announce Veeam Availability Orchestrator (VAO) v3 and DR Pack, which provides businesses up to 80% cost savings while receiving a purpose-built DR planning and compliance solution for all workloads, simplifying and improving DR and BC by eliminating the need for difficult upfront decision making around what workloads not to protect.

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The firm also provided a preview of what the company is planning for upcoming product releases. Simplifiying innovation and addressing the current mass transition to work from home environments, the firm continues to put the data and BC needs of its customers and partners at the forefront of its product development.

“A major focus of VeeamON this week has been the criticality of data to business success as our customers undergo rapid digital transformation,” said Danny Allan, CTO and SVP, product strategy, Veeam. “Automating manually intensive processes and driving greater business value by unlocking the potential of otherwise dormant data is key to a more agile business. VAO v3 provides intelligent orchestration and testing for BC and DR and migration operations, using our advanced recovery technology to eliminate the otherwise manual, time-consuming and repeatable processes for necessary DR and migration planning. And with the new DR Pack, we are changing the game for enterprise-grade DR by delivering orchestration and automation capabilities at a price point that is unheard of in this market. In today’s world, all data is essential and the DR Pack will enable businesses to simply and reliably extend DR planning beyond what’s historically been deemed the most essential workloads to now include all workloads.“

This release brings recovery orchestration support for NetApp ONTAP snapshots, enabling users to reliably ensure the continuity of their IT services at any scale through extensible recovery orchestration from Veeam-powered backups and replicas and array-based replication. VAO v3 offers a range of capabilities that can help businesses to achieve necessary levels of DR planning and compliance by automatically testing, dynamically documenting and executing DR plans in 1-click, from single applications to entire sites.

VAO v3 adds additional capabilities to offer extensible recovery orchestration from array-based replication for all ONTAP customers. This feature, ‘Storage Orchestration Plans’, will enable customers to orchestrate failover on ONTAP storage to a secondary recovery site, whether it be a DR site or a new datacenter in the case of datacenter migration.

VAO enables Veeam and ONTAP users to:

Maximize service availability. Get near-zero RTOs and RPOs for all applications and data with full recovery orchestration support for ONTAP snapshots as well as Veeam-powered backups and replicas.
Operational efficiencies. Eliminate manual, expensive processes with comprehensive one-click orchestration and automation for DR and migrations.
Plan with confidence. Constantly validate recoverability and compliance of DR plans with fully automated, non-disruptive testing and documentation.

In addition, VAO v3 makes necessary DR planning accessible for all workloads with a DR Pack offer for current users of the company’s Backup & Replication or Availability Suite, immediately providing a purpose-built DR planning and compliance solution. Availability is expected within the next 30 days.

In addition to VAO v3, Veeam also provided glimpse into its future product roadmap during VeeamON, specifically:

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v5
As the transition to the work from home environment explodes, Microsoft Teams usage has increased to more than 75 million daily active users⁽ⁱ⁾ as employees strive to communicate, collaborate and stay productive. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v5 makes it easier for users to restore and find documents and files from within Teams. As the firm’s fastest growing product, with downloads by more than 120,000 organizations, representing over 12 million user mailboxes, the latest version of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 will build on the product growth and momentum to deliver native backup and recovery for Teams, providing a fast recovery for Teams data.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365
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With native APIs for Teams, the company will provide an approach to native backup and recovery for Teams with support for the following capabilities:

Reliable Teams backup: Protect Teams data but also channels, settings and tabs.
Restores: Provides a fast and easy recovery experience built for Teams.
Unmatched eDiscovery: Enables granular search and find across Teams components.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v5 will be available in 3Q20.

Veeam Availability Suite
44% of global enterprises are being hindered in their digital transformation journeys due to unreliable, legacy technologies, according to the Veeam 2020 Data Protection Trends Report. In response, the firm provided a sneak peek into a few select new features slated for future updates to the firm’s product, Availability Suite, known as the next gen of data protection with capabilities that increase data availability, portability, and extensibility of modern data environments.

As the company continues to lead enterprises through their journey to digital transformation, multiple features of the upcoming Availability Suite were demonstrated in the following three areas:

Near CDP: Provides VM replication with RPOs of second for tier-one 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 Azure Blob Storage Archive Tier support for Archive Tier.
Instant recovery: Enhanced instant recovery with instant recovery of any backup to a Hyper-V VM, instant publishing of NAS Backup content, and instant recovery of SQL Server and Oracle databases.

“Veeam continues to address critical market needs through new product innovation and current product enhancements. Customers are often concerned with the backup costs and the flexibility of workload support, especially for DR. Veeam’s new DR Pack was developed with the objective of lowering the cost to implement DR for a broad range of workloads. For organizations that have not implemented DR or only selectively implemented it, DR Pack is an example of a product that could make enterprise-wide DR realistically affordable,” said Phil Goodwin, research director, IDC.

“Veeam Availability Orchestrator takes the pain out of orchestrating and maintaining 100% data availability, and it’s so efficient that we can even do testing during business hours, because it takes only ten minutes or so. The great thing about Veeam is that it just works. Because of the speed of recovery and ease of management, no one is now managing data on a day-to-day basis,” said Darren Warner, manager, IT operations, Inchcape Australia

“Veeam helps us accomplish our goals as a business. I can’t count how many times Veeam has helped us recover data quickly. We can dig deeply into any backup to recover exactly what we need. When employees ask us to recover something they’ve mistakenly deleted, we say, ‘No problem, we’ve got this.’ Veeam gives us a level of confidence in our ability to backup and recover like we’ve never had before. We also might incorporate a cloud environment, and there’s only one solution we’d consider for Cloud Data Management. Veeam is an incredible company with incredible people,” said Paul Dombrowski, enterprise systems administrator, CORT

“Microsoft doesn’t provide comprehensive backup of Office 365 data, but Veeam does. Preserving historical email data is critically important – for us, too. We’ve been emailing contracts to customers for years, so retaining historical emails enables us to answer questions if a customer challenges us about a contract. Historical SharePoint and OneDrive data are important too – they contain information for tax purposes. Microsoft has a few built-in safety nets, but they don’t provide a robust solution capable of keeping companies out of legal and tax trouble like Veeam does,” said Johan Logtenberg, IT project manager, Hollander Techniek

⁽ⁱ⁾ Microsoft Fiscal Year 2020 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call; April 29, 2020; Michael Spencer, Satya Nadella, Amy Hood

Read also:
VeeamON: Veeam Availability Orchestrator V2 Enterprise-Grade DR
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VeeamON: Veeam Availability Orchestrator V2 Enterprise-Grade DR
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