Veeam Software, Inc. announced the availability of Availability Suite v9.

This version introduces more than 250 features and enhancements to help organizations deliver on the needs of the always-on enterprise, enabling SLAs for recovery time and point objectives, or RTPO, of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data.

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According to a Forrester/DR Journal survey of global DR decision-makers, 35% of companies reported that mismatched business expectations from technology capabilities was one of the biggest challenges faced when recovering from their most recent disaster or major business disruption ⁽¹⁾. The survey found that business managers and executives are demanding their IT organizations deliver better availability, but IT is struggling to meet those expectations. With Availability Suite v9, the company is enabling enterprises of all sizes to close this gap (the availability gap) and deliver 24/7 availability.

“Today’s enterprises are more demanding than ever before, generating ever-increasing amounts of data to which they expect 24/7 access; this places an immense burden on IT to deliver,” said Ratmir Timashev, CEO, Veeam. “Veeam Availability Suite v9 addresses these needs with our most robust, scalable and feature-rich offering to date. Almost 42,000 customers registered for pre-launch updates (double that of v8), which illustrates the desire among enterprises to move from legacy backup solutions to innovative availability solutions. With this latest launch, Veeam is solidifying our position as the only company able to meet the needs of today’s Always-On Enterprise.“

Availability Suite v9 introduces hundreds of enterprise-focused enhancements and features delivering the following capabilities: high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified recoverability, leveraged data and complete visibility.

Notable highlights within Availability Suite v9 are:

EMC VNX and VNXe hybrid storage array integration
A powerful combination of Veeam and EMC Corp. delivers lower RTPOs with company’s Backup from Storage Snapshots and Explorer for Storage Snapshots. This integration helps IT professionals rapidly create backups from EMC VNX or VNXe storage snapshots up to twenty times faster than the competition and easily recover individual items in two minutes or less – without staging or intermediate steps – all with minimal impact on production Vms.

Additional primary storage integrations for HPE, NetApp and EMC
On-Demand Sandbox for Storage Snapshots and enhancements to Backup from Storage Snapshots for storage solutions from EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NetApp, Inc. to help leverage enterprise storage investments for dev/test and eliminate impact from backup activities on production environment.

Direct NFS Access for any NFS-based primary storage to improve backup performance and remove impact from backup activities on vSphere hosts.

Explorer for Oracle (and many other enhancements for family of company’s Explorers)

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• Explorer for Oracle: Features unique transaction-level recovery of Oracle databases, including agentless transaction log backup so customers can restore databases to a precise point in time, thus achieving low recovery point objectives (RPOs); quick and simple 1-click restore of individual databases; support for databases running on Windows- and Linux-based servers, and fully compatible with Oracle International Corporation‘ Automatic Storage Management (ASM)

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• eDiscovery features for Explorer for Exchange: Useful for complying with legal or government investigations, new features include detailed export reports specifying exactly what was exported, from where, and with what search criteria; as well as search query result size estimation capabilities; and

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Enhancements for Microsoft enterprise applications: Allows restores of Group Policy Objects, integrated DNS records and configuration partition objects with company’s Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory, full-site restores with Explorer for SharePoint, and table-level restores with company’s Explorer for SQL Server.

DRaaS powered by Cloud Connect Replication
Included in v9, firm’s customers get a fully integrated, fast and secure means to replicate workloads to the cloud, enabling DR as a Service (DRaaS) with dramatically improved RTOs. By building a technology that securely and bridges the user to a trusted service provider of their choice, company’s customers no longer have to build and maintain a DR site, offloading a tremendous amount of cost and complexity from their IT infrastructure. The extended functionality gives company’s cloud and service providers the ability to provide their customers with fast and secure DRaaS with the Cloud Connect Replication for Service Providers offering.

Cloud Connect Replication for Service Providers
Cloud Connect includes multi-tenant support,
requires only a single port, and securely transfers data
over SSL/TLS (no VPN required).

Unlimited scale-out backup repository
Managing backup storage is an enormous and expensive effort for the enterprise; in no small part because the exponential rate of data growth is outpacing the ability of legacy solutions to manage it efficiently and cost-effectively. Company’s Unlimited Scale-out Backup Repository addresses this challenge, lowering backup storage hardware spending and simplifying backup storage and backup job management in the enterprise, while improving backup performance up to two times.

“The contradiction between the need to raise IT resiliency and agility while trying to reduce storage burdens is adding complexity and burden to many folks’ IT infrastructures. Veeam’s new Unlimited Scale-out Backup Repository should help alleviate those burdens by simplifying backup target storage, which ought to further ease administration while providing flexibility to backup and virtualization administrators who have more strategic tasks to do than managing their underlying storage pool.” said Jason Buffington, senior analyst, data protection, ESG.

“Veeam Availability Suite V9’s release is a game-changer for the DRaaS market. The new Veeam cloud Connect Replication feature will allow us to bring true DR services, with strong SLAs, to enterprises of all shapes and sizes. Together with its world-class ProPartner community, we are excited to continue to deliver on Veeam’s promise of enabling the Always-On Enterprise.” said Ian McClarty, president, PheonixNAP.

“Veeam cloud Connect replication and failover are game changers for MSPs. Veeam lets us utilize unused resources in our cloud environment for replication rather than deploying dedicated physical environments, so we’ve reduced our capital expenditures, the provisioning time for new customers and their monthly recurring charges.” said Matt Breitbach, storage engineer, LightEdge Solutions, Inc.

“[About Veeam Availability Suite v9] It is the most comprehensive update yet with game-changing features – and the previous releases haven’t been short on innovation. If only everything that went into production was of Veeam quality.” said Leonhard Kurz, consultant, Concat AG IT Solutions.

“There is no better platform than Veeam Availability Suite for meeting (and exceeding) RTOs and RPOs for virtual environments. The flexibility and scalability of the platform allows us to architect highly effective solutions for clients of all sizes, from SMB to Enterprise.” said Matt Brown, director, engineering, HostedBizz.

“Our customers are going to love DRaaS (DR as a Service) with the flexibility to provide full or selective failover and failback to either new or existing infrastructure. The powerful and easy-to-use portal, integrated failover testing, and utility consumption model are an incredibly compelling case for cloud DraaS.” said Nicolas Power, GM, Zettagrid Pty Ltd.

Pricing for Availability Suite v9 starts at $1,150 (€1.100) per socket; pricing for Availability Suite Enterprise Plus starts at $2,650 (€2.350) per socket. In other regions, Availability Suite v9 is available at local pricing.

⁽¹⁾ Source: The State Of Business Technology Resiliency, Q2 2014, Forrester Research, Inc., May 12, 2014.